[ale] If you must restore a windows computer, how do you make it better?

[Robert Reese]

Hello Richard,

Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 2:36:22 PM, you wrote:

> She will not use anything other than windows. End of story. Moving on.

Easy.  Install Ubuntu 9.10 with a very Windows 7-ish theme (perhaps even Enlightenment or similar GUI) and tell her it is Windows 7 Ultimate.

RDAG...

On a more serious note, I've done it with my wife's in-laws a year or so ago.  Unfortunately, VirtualBox proved to be too unstable and unreliable and ended up turning them completely off to the opportunities of Linux.  HOWEVER, that was back when VirtualBox v2 was new.  Now they're up to v3, and it seems quite a bit better.

Oddly enough, install Windows FIRST.  After you get Windows up and running go to WIN+R (shortcut to Run) and type cmd and enter to get into a comfortable terminal screen.  Then enter services.msc into the command line.  (Or, if you don't want the nice command line, just type services.msc into the Run box directly.  Find the three services for the Media Center and disable them.  While you are in there, you can disable some other worthless services which will help the stability and efficiency of her computer.

For backups, get a decent secondary drive (that would make it a third drive, yes) and grab a copy of Acronis True Image Home 9 or 2010 from http://www.acronis.com/ for about $30~$50 depending on where you find it and which version you get; for her, pretty much any version 8 and up will work fine. Configure Acronis to do automatic backups to the secondary (non-Linux) drive.  Don't forget to create a rescue media disk and stick it inside the case of the computer for emergency recoveries (beyond fixing it via Linux, that is.)  A benefit of this is you can create an image of her harddrive after you get it how you want it and fully updated; the next time you have to reinstall Windows all you will need to do is restore that image to the harddrive and you'll have saved yourself several hours of pain.

Then consider one of the following:

- A dual-boot scenario with just 1 second lag time, and rename the Linux boot text to a single underscore.   Naturally, it should boot to Windows by default. She'll probably never notice it or think anything about it.

- Stick an old, used harddrive in the machine (there's one under the left rear of your desk, on the floor, hiding under a layer of dust) and disable it via the BIOS after you install Linux on it (sans the main harddrive to avoid killing the MS boot).  When she has problems, just go into the BIOS and enable the drive plus make it the boot drive.  When you are done fixing the computer, just revert the BIOS.

- Lastly, consider getting a cheap 2GB thumbdrive and making it a Linux boot drive (assuming the BIOS supports booting from USB).  Either keep it with you or drop it inside the case for later on when you'll need it... right beside the Acronis disk.


Oh, as far as getting Media Center, she might not have been swindled and may not have had a choice: during the last several months of XP sales prior to Vista's release, all new computers came with Media Center - you literally could not find a non-Media Center operating system - regardless of whether or not the machine was designed for it.  Don't ask me why; I think it had more to do with the battle of HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray than anything else since MS was backing HD-DVD.

Cheers,
Robert~