Fiddling with computers again...

[sally_maria]

After a TS meeting on Saturday, and a nice chance to meet up with friends, I actually had the opportunity to do some stuff with our computers over the weekend.

With some helpful advice from crazyscot, the boot problem on my parents' computer is fixed - no more seven minute waits for the Grub menu to come up. :-) All it took was installing an experimental updated version - I didn't have to switch the drives round after all, which was great.

Then it was time to finally install Mint 8 on the laptop - I've been running Mint 7 since last summer very successfully, but I decided it was time to move to the official form of Firefox 3.5 and various other updates. It was all very straightforward - keeping my home folder on a separate partition meant that most of my settings carried over with minimal problems. I'm just now making a list of the things I need to change whenever I change the operating system - the wallpaper randomiser, SMPlayer, the additions to fstab to make the data partition automount... Not too bad really, certainly compared with getting a new Windows computer.

Finally, it was time to actually make another shiny_things entry, something I haven't had a lot of time for over the last month. I have a couple of ideas for future posts, but if there is something you want me to talk about, please feel free to ask.

Comments

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

By the way what do you and other folk know about getting rid of Internet Exploder from a PC or Eee running XP? I want the memory space back drattit! I was going to just use the add/remove programmes tool in control panel but then it came up with this long list of things that mayn't work (win service packs etc) if I removed IE. I thought the EU had sorted Microspawn out about that so that we didn't have to be lumbered with it ...

[sally_maria]

Unfortunately, whereas I think the latest versions of Windows are designed to make IE more of an optional extra - thanks to the EU - back when XP was written IE pretty much had its hooks into the entire operating system.

So removing it and keeping a working system is probably possible, but not at all easy. The general recommendation is not to try it. :-(