When I left for work this morning, my office desktop was screwed. I’d wiped the Linux partition (I never used it at work anyway) to make way for more MP3s the previous day, and forgotten that was the drive grub needed to access to boot. Desktop screwed. Since I’d forgotten the admin password for XP, I couldn’t fix it.
This morning I came in early, brought Knoppix with me, and lifted all the user data off with that (About 2mb, all told. I run Teflon Windows installs, nothing sticks to the main box for long, it’s all stored on the server, so I can wipe it clean again), reboot, reinstall WindowsXP, drink tea (And repair the W2k box. This is a 1998 era box running W2k on a 2gig drive – not big enough, so someone’s compressed the drive. Since the swap space is now compressed, it took me two hours (click, boil kettle, click, pour water, click, type, ok, take out teabag, click…) to get it back (and put the swap on the TOTALLY UNUSED 10GIG PARTITION instead) and turn off all the prettiness enhancers. Today’s job was to reinstall W2k so our mac-bound Designer has something that runs Win/IE – the main platform we’re developing for – and can test on.)
So, WinXP, turn off prettiness, install Firefox, Thunderbird, XChat, Gaim, Plugins for each. Then O (Who is the accountant, along with other things) came in and said I was to get the new laptop. This new laptop was gained when a friend of a friend would rather buy a new laptop than fix the old one (and this is a nice laptop). So I’ve now got a nice new laptop to play with, and can IRC from the living room.
I find it amusing that whilst the laptop doesn’t have Wireless networking, my heavyweight desktop does, so I can use the wire that used to go to that for the Laptop.
Currently, I’m seeing how long the battery lasts, with MP3s playing, networking working, and everything going. I’ll be watching DVDs in a bit. So far, it looks like about 5/6 hours. I spent the train journey home using it as a thousand dollar MP3 player to catch up on four missed episodes of LUGRardio.
Note to future self, berate Aq about ntop and Advanced Unix Development next time you see him.