How I Spent the Past 18 Hours
So last night, while working late, I stepped away from my computer to get a drink only to return to a scrambled screen and my caps-lock and scroll-lock lights blinking. A hard reboot later and that was it… the system wouldn’t boot. I ran fsck and let it run for several hours to no avail.
So I was relegated to booting from my LiveCD of Ubuntu 9.10, hooking up my external drive, saving what data I could, and reloading.
Turns out that the reload was just what my little laptop needed. It’s been so long since it has performed as it does now. I had forgotten about the merits of a full scrub and reload with regard to system performance. Course, when I used to do it I was running windows and almost had to do it out of necessity every 6-7 months. I ran this laptop on Ubuntu and about six full upgrades to it for about 3.5 years before it began to degrade in performance. Not going to complain about that one bit!
Any of you who have yet to try Ubuntu Linux, I urge you to go to their website at http://www.ubuntu.com and download a copy for free. You can boot directly off of the CD and run it without even touching the rest of your system and check it out for yourself. If you don’t like it, just reboot and remove the CD from your drive and you are back in the land of Windows, once again (though I’m uncertain why anyone would want that). If, however, you do like it, you can either do a full replacement install or you can install Ubuntu along side your Windows installation and dual-boot, selecting which OS you want to use at startup.
Go ahead, give it a try. Linux may surprise you!