Great start to the week for me, booted up my PC on arrival at work at 8.30am and 2 hours later it’s still trying to get Windows XP started … oops! I have been having some odd happenings on this particular PC (Dell Dimension 8400) in the past few months but there was still plenty of disk space so didn’t worry too much. By lunch time it was clear that WinXP on this machine was buggered, it wouldn’t even boot off the install disk and running chkdsk made no difference. This is the last straw for me and Microsoft … I have hereby decided to ditch XP and get Linux on this machine.
I’ve been messing around with computers since I was a boy (Sinclair ZX80, BBC Micro, Vic20 .. then unix machines in the late 80′s ) but it’s only since I’ve been working with Microsoft PC’s that I’ve experienced so much wasted time spent buggering about to install things, fix things, uninstall – reinstall the OS etc … the amount of wasted work time is probably in the region of about a week every 2 years. So the time has come, no more M$ for me … I managed to get my files backed up using Knoppix (a live Linux CD) and am now waiting to wipe the machine and install Linux which I will document here.
