[ale] Finding desktops, laptops and hardware in Atlanat

[James P. Kinney III]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 08:18 -0500, Geoffrey wrote:

> This is the direction most vendors are headed.  Sucks, because they 
> expect you to not use that portion of the hard drive.   As I noted 
> previously, I had to create 10 cds off the existing drive of a compaq 
> computer in order to have my 'restore' disks.  That's around 6 gig of 
> wasted space on the drive.
> 
While it could be viewed (and is) as wasted drive space, it is also a
real butt-saver for the clueless windows crowd. Their system gets borked
and they can repair it by rebooting to the hidden partition and doing an
overlay installation. Yes, hard drives can fail and they can loose the
entire thing. But if it's a system under warranty from, say Dell, they
can send you a new hard drive ready to go with the hidden partition.

Realistically, a clueless newbie with an 80G drive is a dangerous thing!

I _MUCH_ prefer to see a an application drive (C:) and a data drive (D:)
and the hidden partition so the use of the hidden partition to overlay
keeps the "My Documents" folder intact. But that is never how things are
installed. It sure would make M$ crap more upgrade/repair friendly.

On some systems that I have built, I have created a linux partition with
the ability to store a dd copy of the main winbloze application
partition. That wastes loads of space but give me the ability to "roll
back" and entire system when the box gets hosed by a bad app/bug/moron
on the keyboard.

g4l would be a better way but it still needs better windows tools to
actually defrag the drive and create one contiguous chunk of used blocks
and then write NULL to the rest of the drive so it can get compress away
to nothing.

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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