I got a new Dell Inspiron 1300 today… I wasn’t looking for a desktop replacement, but rather just a laptop that can run various applications and works while I’m away from my office.
After I watched the FedEx truck drive by my house & then see the status change online to “customer not home,” I sat around for a few hours until I could pick up the boxes from the local office. Thanks FedEx…way to go the extra mile…
Anyway… so now I have my computer and the first thing I did was throw away all the shit that Dell gives you. 5 cds of worthless crap… AOL offers, Roxio crap, and all other crapware offers they bundle… A suggestion to Dell… provide an option at checkout time to not include all of that crap.
So before I could dive into their install of XP, I threw in a Vista dvd and started installing it.
Vista
MS finally got rid of their ancient DOS based installer and replaced it with a more modern GUI. One extremely nice feature is that you can now provide drivers via disk drives, cd/dvds or usb drives. They also provide a relatively simple disk utility to partition/format disks. Overall the experience is pleasant.
The install process seemed to be quicker than installing XP. A tip of the hat goes to MS as the install only needs to reboot 2 times. Who knows… maybe with VistaXL Ultimate Kickass v2.1 they’ll figure out how to install it with 0 or 1 reboot. Anyway, the install finished before the end of an hour long show about the history of ecstasy; it took about a 1/2 hour. Apparently the PC scores a 1.0 on the Vista experience scale… This automatically disables the annoying transparent title bars, thankfully. Apparently after talking with someone who knows more about Vista scores than I do, I have a pretty crappy box. Basically it’s at the bottom of the scale. sweet…
This link is useful for how to get rid of the gay “Favorites” addition to Windows Explorer…
Man… talk about locking down the OS… I got 4 confirmation dialogs when I tried to create a folder. This should be a real joy to work with daily…
Total Install Time: ~1/2 hour
Ubuntu
Well.. Ubuntu trumps MS with it’s installer… not only is it a Gui, it goes a step further and sets up a live cd. So basically it gives you Ubuntu loaded directly off the cd. Very cool… it allows you to surf the internet (using Firefox) among accessing all other applications and utils that you would come to expect from a linux distro. Note, this analysis of the live cd is coming from a relative Linux retard, so take what I just wrote with a grain of salt.
Total Install Time: ~15 Minutes
After a few joyous outbursts, I realized that grub (the linux boot loader) was not detecting my Vista install properly. Thanks to this thread, adding the following to /boot/grub/menu.lst did the charm… The main point to mention is that it reads rootnoverify, rather than just root. If you’re reading this for an answer to the same thing, make sure you have the correct disk and partition specified for where your Vista install is located.
title Windows Vista
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
savedefault
chainloader +1