To briefly recapitulate, here are the relevant details: I installed Ubuntu alongside Vista on my laptop and the first things I noticed were:
1) My screen resolution was detected as “1440 by 900” which was not the case with my Ubuntu virtual machine. It was ‘stuck’ at 800 by 600 and this was a welcome change. 🙂
2) My HP bluetooth laser mouse was detected without problems and when I found out about the HP Linux Image and Printing Toolbox, my life was complete. 😀 What? I’m a nerd. I use HP printers and having their extended capabilities possible on Ubuntu made my experience that much better.
3) The X-Sane Image scanner worked OOB (out of box) and man, I love NOT troubleshooting sometimes. 🙂 Sadly, OCR capabilities suck (I loved the I.R.I.S. OCR that came with my HP printer software for Vista).
4) GIMP (the awesome and free image editor) was about three times faster on Ubuntu/Linux.
However, all would not be complete without a small disappointment. When I logged back into Vista, certain programs quit working. My initial instinct was that the partitioning did not sit well with Windows Vista, but it didn’t help that the following things happened before I ever partitioned the hard drive:
1) I was never able to finish a manual defragmentation. My PC was set to automatically defragment on a schedule, but when I tried to do this manually, I lost patience after an entire day was gone without any idea of how far the defragmentation had gone.
2) I had previously attempted to partition my hard drive with the Live CD’s GParted tool and I aborted that attempt.
So I’m pretty sure that somewhere along those lines, I lost some data. However, I didn’t lose any sleep because:
i) I have my computer’s recovery DVDs.
ii) I have an image of my computer’s hard drive before I started slicing and dicing at it. 🙂
iii) I have copies of my important files on DVD and my external hard drives.
After testing out Ubuntu on a 25GB partition on my hard drive, I decided that it was time to dive into Ubuntu completely and that merits another post all by itself. 🙂
