[ale] new t-40 thinkpad...

[David S. Jackson]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 06:47:05PM -0400 Dow Hurst <dhurst at kennesaw.edu> wrote:
> BootitNG will resize and slide partitions around and is shareware.  
> Worked great for me.

I'm checking the website now...

> Partition Magic is the standard.  The Opensource NTFS project
> on Sourceforge provides ntfsresizer which works well on
> resizing the current partition into half its original size.  

Hmmm, I'll have to check this out too...

> If you never boot XP before running ntfsresizer then you might
> get much better results.  I think NTFS immediately puts some
> data at the far end of the filesystem so the partition can't be
> resized easily.  

Yuk.

> The inherent MS utility for fscking the NTFS filesystem sucks
> big time.  

What a surprise.

> You won't want to use it on a regular basis if you were running
> XP for real.  I'll tell you from my experience that XP seems
> sexy at first and is much more stable than anything else that
> MS has done for the consumer version of their OS.  To avoid
> getting bogged down in it, I wouldn't even bother booting it.

Too late.  :-)

But you're right.  It's purty, but so are lots of WM/environments
for X.  X is far more stable than it has ever been for me, too.
And so are the nvidia drivers too.  (Not sure what chipset this
beastie comes with...)

> Anyway, I feel sympathetic since I've been where you are with a
> fancy laptop from Dell that came thru me to a user.  I wish now
> that I hadn't even bothered since it just wasted a bunch of my
> time dealing with resizing the partition because I had to boot
> the OS to see the coon.  It was wide open on the campus
> wireless network immediately.  It just isn't worth your time to
> see a pretty picture and cute wizards slapped on top of NT.
> Good luck with putting the good stuff on it!

Thanks Dow!

Actually, you may have hit the nail on the head.  My wife bought
a NetVista from IBM a few years ago.  It had WinME with one of
those recovery partitions.  Sure enough, Windows crapped out and
had to be "recovered" from scratch.  The recovery partition never
worked.  After several tries and as many failures, I tried to
reformat and reinstall.  But part of the bios was written to the
recovery partition, so the machine never could behave correctly
again.  I wound up having to replace the motherboard, swap the
bits and peripherals over to the new MB, which required a new
box, since the NetVista box had a strange form factor that
wouldn't accept a standard-sized MB.  Strange.  That was a
nightmare.  I hope that type of horror story doesn't repeat
itself on the TP!  :->

-- 
David S. Jackson                        dsj at dsj.net
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight
of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.
		-- Dave Barry
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