Monday, August 7

 

Got a 100GB hard disk for the laptop, thanks to Fujistu's well organised site , it was easy to see which model I needed and what the differences would be ( more power and 3db louder, though it's barely noticeable )

The install on the vaio was very simple, unfortunately it is not mentioned in the upgrade section of the Vaio site or manual even though it is designed to be upgraded easily, strange?

I burnt the recovery media first ( 11 CD-Rs ) , which took a few hours.

On the VGN-B1VP there is a small drawer that comes out next to the PCMCIA card, when you remove on screw on the bottom. The drawer comes out, with the hard disk attached and its simply a matter of taking out 4 screws.  Replaced the disk with the new one , put it back together, with the 1st system recovery disk in and took another hour or so to restore it to the state it came in last year.

I Installed Ubuntu 6.06, the installer is impressive, it uses the liveCD. The only problem I have is with the Parition Manager, its confusing as too which drive the space is going when you use the simple slider, and if you edit the Parition table manually, I couldn't get to create a linux-swap, it kept coming up as unknown.

I ended up with a 40GB D drive on windows, and a 20GB root parition for Ubuntu, when I intended the reverse ( the right hand side of the slider is for Ubuntu, the numbers indicate the amount left on the existing parition )

Installing Windows and Ubuntu consecutively, it is interesting to compare the experience. Not taking into account the parition problems, windows didn't have to deal with that as I installed it first.

Ubuntu is certainly, the smaller, quicker install. It comes pre installed with Firefox, Openoffice the applications which I use  on windows anyway, although it doesn't recognise my modem and setting up the wireless connection isn't as easy as on Windows and its media playing capabilites are very limited out of the box, although on Ubuntu I didn't get pissed off with the Norton, Yahoo Messenger and the rest of the packaged software which won't go away easily on XP

I think Ubuntu is the better experience and I was impressed by the speed with which it ran on old PC's.

Just ordered 10 CD's from Ubuntu.com, which I think should be kept in the office for people who are looking for a reliable OS.

I find it interesting that, my previous experiences with Linux, when I used to dual-boot,  my email or files were always on the other parition, but as the services I use are web based, Gmail, blogger, flickr and applications are multi platform Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Earth, Skype etc...

The barrier to switching is much much lower

posted by 12345 10:13 AM