My History with Computers Part 2, Windows XP, and Linux

I’ve been having some issues with a Windows Vista install that has gone on the fritz, which is why I took so long to post this…

Well, here is Part 2 of my History with computers.

Now, somethime between 2001 and 2002 we got a Windows XP E-machine, it ran well, but my mom thought that Windows XP looked too much like a clown to be good in business :), E-machines was a good company … at the time.

After that one I got a Windows XP Compaq desktop.  Once again it ran well, though fairly slowly, it was eventually pointed out that I had gotten a computer with a slow CPU, so this wasn’t Windows XP’s fault.

One of my aunts had also just married a European man (From the UK to be specific) and he brought some disks with Mandrake Linux 9 on them.  This is what started me onto Linux, I installed it on the Windows 98 E-machine, and ran it for a fair amount of time.  It wouldn’t update due to the company behind it changing the name to Mandriva, which broke the older updaters.  I ran it off and on for a while, but stuck mostly with Windows.

Around this time is when I started to see problems with some of our computers.  My mom had gotten another E-machine around the time that I got the Compaq desktop computer.  Her E-machine computer started randomly re-booting, and crashing.  we took it into the Geek Squad… for a whole week, and they gave it a clean bill of health.  it died two days after, motherboard failure.  She got a HP Desktop from Walmart with Windows XP Media Center Edition.  This was just before the release of Vista, so it had one of those ‘Windows Vista Capable’ labels.

The HP Machine ran very well for over a year, then it got a Virus which wasn’t detected by the Virus checker, it did a lot of damage to the OS before I installed AVG Free Antivirus to replace the older, paid, program.  The viruses were detected and removed, but the computer was far too unstable for work.  My mom needed that computer running well within 24 hours, and she didn’t trust the Geek Squad since the last machine.  I decided to try out Ubuntu Linux.  The machine was running by the next day, able to boot between the unstable copy of Windows XP, and Ubuntu 7.04.  In retrospect, this was the first step to our ongoing removal of Windows from our main machines.

At this point I got a new E-machine, which had a very badly bugged copy of Windows XP (Last XP Machine at Walmart, everything else was Vista) The copy of Windows XP could not run any Full-screen programs, even though I installed a high-end graphics card.  It was soon running Ubuntu 7.04, and it got upgraded to 7.10 in October of that year.

Whew, that was a lot of text 🙂  Tune in tomorrow (I hope…*) for the third part of this series! Windows Vista, and Beyond!

*My Windows Vista/7 Laptop just died, time to put Ubuntu 10.10 on it 😉

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