total tech immersion

Today I had a total tech immersion. First I got out the vacuum, tracked down and confronted every dust bunny from behind the desk to inside the PCs. Then I decided it was time to rebuild my older PC. I had a different case that was 5 pounds lighter than the old one. I stripped out all the parts down to the motherboard, moved the power supply, mounted all the drives. It was a good time to rearrange things for a more efficient solution.

The hardest part was plugging in all the wires, good thing I had a diagram that maps out what is what. I got it all together and plugged it in, it didn't work. I checked out all the details but had the unit on it's side. It finally worked and I was into XP before you know it. Now wait! I installed two hard drives, I just wanted to see if it all worked.

Then I slipped in the Linux live CD. This one was called Crunchbang, a remix of Ubuntu I mentioned in a previous blog post. I made sure the CD player was the first boot device, hit the button, Crunchbang booted up. I found the disk partioner supplied with Crunchbang, divied the drive into two pieces, a main one and a swap area. Then I hit install, followed the prompts and soon Crunchbang was installed. So when I boot up I can select XP or Crunchbang Linux and roll with it.

Of course the day wasn't finished until I had sound and could play my collection of YouTube videos in .flv format. It worked right out the box, I still can't do that in XP. Then I needed a picture viewer that could made a displayed pic a wallpaper. I am set now. Crunchbang is not bad to be so lean. Now I will tell you the secret of computer life. Get a smallish drive just for the operating system and installed applications. Put your stuff on a different drive. This will save you much agony in the long run.

Well I'd better shutdown and sleep or I'll be up two days before you know it. What a day!