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In February 2008, I decided it was time to build a new PC; not that there was anything really wrong with my AMD Skt A system, but technology had moved on, and components had gotten more powerful, and cheaper.

Within 6 months of building the new system, my Win XP OS was bloated, bogging down and becoming very unreliable – I was getting so sick of this shit! I just wanted a reliable PC that would let me look after my business sites, browse the web, and handle my emails.

For a few years now, I’ve toyed with the idea of getting rid of’ Windoze’, and running a Linux based system instead. Over time I’ve installed and fiddled with various distros on spare hard drives, but nothing had seemed friendly enough to make the switch over from ‘Microsuck’.

get Ubuntu

Anyhow, I was trolling through a PC magazine sometime in August ‘08 and came across an article about the latest version of Ubuntu – 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’. It sounded pretty good, so I downloaded the iso, burnt it to CD, then ran it ‘live’ from CD first (which doesn’t make any changes to existing system) just to see what it looked like – it was pretty impressive, not perfect, but certainly worth a closer look, so I installed it on a new drive.

It’s been almost 12 months now, and Ubuntu is just as fast and reliable as when I first installed it. I had been dual booting Ubuntu & XP for a couple of months after installing ‘Hardy’; but as was bound to happen, XP eventually ‘fell over’ and wouldn’t boot at all – what a piece of crap!

Enough of this crap I thought; I made a simple decision to dive into Ubuntu  full-time, and I’m so glad I did. It has been, and still is, a steep learning curve, but Ubuntu blows Windows XP & Vista completely away for power, speed and reliability; and like all Linux Operating Systems is completely FREE to use and modify.

My Ubuntu 8.04.2 Linux desktop is displayed as one large desktop spread over twin Samsung 19″ LCD monitors (4:3 aspect), via an ATI Radeon 3450 graphics card with resolution set to 2560 x 1024.

Unfortunately there are still a couple of applications that require me to use Windows XP … grrhhh … but I have that sorted by running XP inside VirtualBox; and you know it actually runs better in a virtual environment than it ever did natively. And if XP crashes, it doesn’t drag my whole system down – I just ‘force quit’ XP, then restart it again in Virtualbox; and all the while I continue doing other stuff in Ubuntu (how cool is that).

So my current, and very reliable PC system consists of an AMD 2.8 Ghz dual core CPU, AM2+ Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 mainboard, with 2 GB of RAM, dual DVD burners, 1 pata and 4 sata drives totalling 2,640 MB storage.

For the desktop I’m using Compiz window manager, with Emerald window decorator, and the Mythbuntu desktop theme. I have Screenlets displaying system info, temps and fan speeds; and have added Cairo-dock at bottom of screen for a ‘Mac’ like menu – I’m still learning stuff, as well as tweaking things to my liking, but I have no intention of going back to Windows.

Several of my friends have since switched over to Ubuntu, and are loving it; one is using 8.10 ‘Intrepid Ibex’, another 4 are using 9.04 ‘Jaunty Jackalope’ – definitely worth the effort!