Since my last post, I've hardly blogged, tweeted, or otherwise been very publicly active on the Net at all. Mostly I've been editing my book and trying to wrestle it into readable form even as it mutated into two different shapes. But I've still been busy, for the last few months in fact, replacing the late lamented Windows XP with Ubuntu Studio Linux on my old P4 box and gradually setting up Windows 7 and Linux Mint on the cute little Core Duo unit in the living room. This is the sequel and update.
Part of the struggle involved a much delayed game of musical hard drives. The new computer came with only an 80GB hard drive, which didn't give me much room considering how much stuff I had on two hard drives on the old box, so I had it upgraded to the current industry standard of 1TB and transferred all my music, videos, and games to it. Then I cloned my 40GB C drive on the P4 box to the 250GB drive, expanded the partition on that to the full drive (except for %GB of Linux swap), transferred much of my old data back to it, replaced the 40GB drive with the 80GB one from the new computer, and installed Ubuntu Studio on that. To do this, I realized I had to buy a USB hard drive enclosure to do the clones and transfers I couldn't do over the network. After that, there was the task of reinstalling programs that is still ongoing.
The important thing is that I no longer have to deal with the dying XP's increasing lack of security. Win7 is much more secure (and still regularly updated), and Linux is more secure still (though I there still is the learning curve). Now if only the rumors of a Windows 10 upgrade being free to Win7 users were true — though I'm not holding my breath...
The bad part: it made me miss 50/90...
