Setting up a new laptop

Acer Aspire 5610 So, I’ve picked up a new Acer Aspire laptop for my consulting work.  It was a pretty good deal – $750 for a 1.86GHz Dual Core, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, Dual Layer DVD Burner, 802.11abg WiFi, and a 15.4″ Widescreen.

Spent a good portion of the day loading up Windows Vista Ultimate, Office 2007, Firefox, Virtual PC, OneCare, and a whole host of other software.  So far, I’m impressed with the device, it is really responsive.  I’ve not had a new PC since the Pentium 4 HT’s came out several years ago.

So, finally its ready to go – guess I better get to work!

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Surviving without Windows – Day 20

So how have I been doing in my month-long quest to be Linux-only user for all December 2006?

Not as well as I had hoped.

Mainly its my fault for trying this in the wrong way. Instead of backing up my data, wiping my Windows partition and loading up Fedora Core 6 (FC6) like I had originally planed in early November. I simply installed FC6 in a VMWare instance on my Vista laptop. It works quite well all around, but it is not as “convenient” as it should be.

The fact that I’m already booted to my Vista desktop and then need to launch my FC6 virtual machine to do my work. Compounding this is my workload — at work. I’ve been so inundated by work that I have little time at home to get the things done that I had planned, so when Windows comes up, I plain forget to launch into FC6 to get my work done.

Now all this is all excuses and we all know it. So my revised plan is to do a little more learning in FC6 to get a better feel for the OS and to search out some of the tools I need in a Linux environment that I enjoy in Windows. Also, I’m going to revisit this trial in the New Year – probably February – and I’ll do it the right way by installing Linux on my hard drive, and put Windows in a virtual machine, so there!

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