I've joined the dark side.

Posted by Nighthawk on March 14, 2011, 8:55 a.m.

You can decide whether "the dark side" comes from installing Linux, or the fact that I chose to use Kubuntu.

My poor laptop has been having problems for at least a year now. It tends to not want to boot up unless it reaches a temperature most people wouldn't dream of allowing their prized computer to overheat to. Worse, it crashes five minutes after startup 50% of the time, and it crashes when I put it in sleep mode or hibernate 100% of the time. The problem here is that I can't take my laptop anywhere, which was the whole point of getting a laptop in the first place.

Since the laptop was freezing most often at the Windows loading screen, I had the idea to install Linux as a dual boot in a vain attempt to make my laptop usable again, and it actually worked. My laptop is now running a dual boot between Kubuntu 10.10 and Windows Vista. It took all day for me to figure out how to get my wireless card to work, and another hour or two to get rid of an annoying flashing screen bug. Now that those are fixed, it runs beautifully, without a hitch. It boots up 100% of the time, and it doesn't lock up in sleep mode.

Unfortunately, I was only able to free 7GB of space for it to start, so I'm currently allowing 5 GB for the root folder, and 2GB for swap, which is obviously not ideal. I'm trying to rearrange my MFT files using a program designed for such a purpose, but Vista isn't cooperating. One person suggested just letting Linux be the dominant OS, and running Vista on a VM, which I am skeptically considering right now. In the mean time, though, I'm just happy everything works.

I'll post screenshots of my desktop later.

Comments

Eva unit-01 13 years ago

I used to have a Toshiba laptop. It was pretty good, I mostly used it as a heater

Also awesome. Revived it from the dead bro.

Ferret 13 years ago

I has a Toshiba laptop, it's pretty nice to me if you ignore it's battery life.

At first I thought the dark side was how you made the background for your blog content dark :P

Also, your avatar is a frog. Why is it a frog? So hard to recognize you. :(

Rusky 13 years ago

If your laptop is powerful enough (which it doesn't sound like) a VM would be a really good idea. As it is, it sounds like it would be easier to just save all your files from Windows and then reinstall it, on another machine if you have/can afford one.

DesertFox 13 years ago

Yeargh! Nighthawk's back!

PY 13 years ago

Defragment your drive and try resizing again.

I wouldn't recommend a VM, if you're having issues with hard drive space you probably don't have the resources to run a VM acceptably.

KaBob799 13 years ago

What did you do to your poor copy of windows D=

Rusky 13 years ago

PY: Hard drive space isn't any more of an issue with virtualization than it is with dual booting. What you need is RAM, processing power (e.g. multiple cores) and hardware virtualization support.

svf 13 years ago

5gb…. Gah…

You need an external hard-drive. Those things are very nifty plus very cost efficient since you can buy 1tb's for around $100.. . :D

Ferret 13 years ago

I got 1.5TB for half that price. :D

Ferret 13 years ago

Christmas :3

(Newegg :P)