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Our Blogs Open Sauce Crossing the Windows pain threshold | Crossing the Windows pain threshold |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 05 October 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 The new box was duly outfitted with Windows XP and both father and son were extremely happy. Three or four months down the line, they had to call me over - tentatively, I must admit - as some of the old Windows character was showing through. This had happened relatively swiftly as they were now online all the time, courtesy of a new ADSL connection. I didn't hear anything from them until last evening when the woman of the house rang through to seek help. This time, the symptoms wre again quite typical - a box that had been restarting on its own soon after booting. This had been happening for a few days and, by yesterday, there was no sign of it booting at all. When I went over later in the evening, the kid had a look of resignation on his face, the likes of which I haven't seen before. From some source, his mother had also heard about Linux. She asked me whether such problems would happen if they ran Linux. It was time for some education and I provided it; indeed, I laid it on thick. But I was careful to point out that there was some give and take involved as with all choices in life. But the boy, I think, has had it. He was willing to go for a single-boot Linux box and didn't seem to care what he would have to give up. I advised caution and said that I would take the box with me, get it working and set up Linux as a dual-boot system. I advised him to use the Linux installation when he went online and to use the Windows bit when he wanted to carry out tasks that did not require him being online. He was more than willing to agree. When I got back and started investigating, I found that the drive letters on the box had changed. There were four DVD drives listed even though the box has only one. And the main drive had been renamed as D with C being allotted to a 1.7 meg space which Windows, in its wisdom, had omitted to format during the initial installation over a year ago. This had now been made the active partition - again through some act of God, or possibly Gates - and hence it could not boot. As I come to this end of this column, the download of a Linux iso has almost been completed. I need to cry a halt so that I can get this kid's PC done and sent back to him on the morrow. No doubt there'll be some interesting times as he gets acclimatised to working with a genuine operating system.
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