I still have a draft post sitting in WordPress where I was going to chronicle my previous Windows reinstall last May or something. I never got around to finishing it.

This time around I didn’t want to reinstall Windows. It is always a hassle, but my computer was acting up too much. Now I feel a bit foolish for doing that after everything I went through. I would get the vague error DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL in the middle of installing every time.

After trying many possible solutions I finally began to take the step of unplugging everything except the essentials from the motherboard. At this point I noticed that there was a significant amount of dust caked between the CPU fan blades and the top of the heatsink on the processor. There was probably little to no air being blown through to cool the CPU. All at once I began to realize this was the main problem with my computer. It explained the reboots when I was encoding FLAC files (a processor intensive task) and it might also explain the font corruption that I would experience at times that was annoying me the most. But at this point it was too late. I had formatted the partition already.

This whole ordeal was pushing two weeks. In the meantime I had been getting by running a live CD of Puppy Linux. I’d been using this distribution for about 6 months on my old 400 MHz AMD K6-III in San Jose since it makes it seem really fast. The great thing about Puppy is that the entire OS runs in RAM from a multi-session CD that settings and files can be saved back to and loaded upon the next boot. Apparently it is not very hard on the processor either.

After Windows wasn’t installing I also made an attempt to install Ubuntu and the computer would lock up during that process too. Now that the computer is under control I have a functioning Ubuntu partition also.

Since I was on a role with the various Linux distributions I decided to try openSUSE since it is the number two download on DistroWatch.com. I am composing this blog from within it right now. I must say that I’m impressed.

Playing around with these different operating systems and seriously thinking about my attachment to Windows over these past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that I don’t need it all that much. Although I consider myself a pretty adept computer user, most of what I do with my PC is fairly basic and software in Linux can accommodate me mostly.

I have re-evaluated my need to boot into Windows primarily. The only things I’ve actually installed on it are the Flock browser, a driver to read ext3 partitions (this is a crucial issue in my acceptance of not being locked into Windows), AVG Free Anti-Virus, and Quicken. My only problem is that I cannot get Quicken Basic 2007 to install under Wine. I really enjoy using Quicken and the last time I tried GnuCash I didn’t find it a good enough replacement. Maybe I’ll give it another spin.

One other thing I decided to do was rely heavily on the PortableApps Suite for the programs I will probably use in Windows. I got a 4GB USB key for Christmas and I’ll be putting it to use. I’ve got Firefox Portable, Thunderbird Portable, OpenOffice.org Portable, Gaim Portable, and VLC Media Player Portable. There are probably a few more applications that I use in Windows that I will need to make sure I can find a way to replace or use. EAC for ripping CDs is essential I know, and I really like Picasa.

I plan on giving some more extensive reviews of my experiences with these various operating systems and my new way of computing over the next few days.

technorati tags: linux, puppylinux, ubuntu, opensuse, portableapps