Over the weekend, I finally took the plunge and installed Ubuntu Linux on my still shiny-new laptop. Contrary to Microsoft’s promises, Vista hadn’t made me go ‘wow’, not once. It was taking ages to boot up, and I really don’t like its networking functions. With virtually nothing on the new laptop, certainly nothing I needed to worry about losing, it seemed like the right time to try something risky.
Just as well: the Vista C and D drives were destroyed by the partitioning process. So I’m now using a Ubuntu-only laptop, as opposed to the dual-boot machine I had intended.
So far it’s an enjoyable experience, but I do want my Vista setup back – after all, I did pay for it. Like most Acer machines, my laptop came with a hidden partition, which should let me reinstall the factory Vista setup painlessly. Except it won’t. I’ve got a support call in with Acer HQ, but my guess is that since the hidden partition has swelled up from 2GB to 56GB, I need to repartition again.
Of course, Dell would have to pick today to announce the availability of pre-installed Ubuntu machines in the UK market…
Responses
Simon, don’t install a Win partition, use VMWare instead! You can have as many operating systems running on the same PC at the same time as you like. Will work perfectly with Ubuntu as the base system as it’s so stable. You could then run Vista as a virtual machine, and maybe have another Linux one too running Apache, PHP etc for web development…
Listen Dave, you’ve got me into enough trouble as it is… 🙂
[…] bye Ubuntu (for now) Published August 28th, 2007 linux I gave up. A couple of weeks back, I turned my mono-boot Vista laptop into a mono-boot Ubuntu laptop with a screwed-up Vista […]