Argh. Windows.

Several months back, I rescued a computer from the garbage. It's an older HP Pavilion that had a broken hard drive. It had Win7 home premium on it. Using an Ubuntu boot USB stick I could see the contents of the drive but it won't boot to Windows. I couldn't fix the drive so I bought a cheap one - 320 gigs for about 20 bucks to replace it.

I did not snoop into the contents of the old drive - just enough to get the idea that repair programs had been recently installed and failed. That's right... the disk wasn't wiped. I wiped it.

I also added another 4 gig of ram and a cheap Nvidia card... along with a newer power supply because HP sticks in wimpy power supplies for their desktops... and installed Xubuntu. Software install time... about an hour and a half.

I got bored with it and installed Ubuntu Studio and used it with my cheap MIDI setup. Software install time... about an hour and a half. But you know... I still had the activation code posted on the computer box. I've tried installing Windows 7 with ...er... sketchy activation codes... and Microsoft reached out and said, "Uh, uh, uh... you didn't say the magic word." They didn't disable the computer - they just changed the screen to note that it wasn't an Official Version. And no, you can't change the screen.

Now, I'm a Linux Grrl and all... but sometimes you just need Windows. *#&*%. So I checked HP's web site and found I could buy replacement media. For 45 dollars... I'll take the chance.

I took out the Nvidia card as to not confuse the software and ran the install. It took about 2 and a half hours. I haven't fully checked it out but it looks like all the drivers got installed and everything.

But now, 2 hours later... I'm still installing Windows 7 updates. It's not quite halfway through. I'll probably leave it on overnight.

So with just about any Linux distribution you'd be up and running with a fully installed and upgraded system - complete with web browsers, media players and an office suite in less than two hours. I *think* I have an office suite installed - but little else except trialware - which are probably out of date.

So even after I have all the updates installed it'll be needing a clean up. I've already installed Firefox and CCleaner. It comes with Nortons but I haven't activated it yet. I wanted to get the updates installed first.

Then I scrub the trialware and other garbage. A moderately good graphics card would really make this old machine 'talk'. I could put in a faster processor... but I'm not going to spend the money. I might not keep this machine but gift it to someone who needs a Windows 7 machine.

But sheeesh... this is taking a long time.

-m