Imagine the level of temptation for the defenestration of said device when the hard drive chugged its last.
Or, you know, make like the guys in Office Space.
And it's not like I didn't see it coming, what with the one-too-many BSODs that lit up that screen. But when the memory's just upgraded and everything's still working well, I had thought, well, surely it's not so bad...
Ironically, it was when I was trying to figure out how to defragment and partition the drive so I can install Linux on the existing Windows OEM that the hard drive scoffed at me in derision and died. Like, right at the restart after defragmentation. That was how much it hated me/its life.
So. What happens after. Well, sit back, relax, and let me tell you about what to do when your PC/laptop's old and you can't yet afford a new one/a mac mini.
Because you can talk shit all you want, but once you've had one or two Apple devices in your hand, you'll stop wondering why Macheads won't let you hear the end of it.
But. In the meantime. PC.
[sidebar: What happened to Vlad, you ask? Well, it's ancient and sent off to the sunset. Kidding. The LCD's busted and when everything on it's like an entire decade old you keep it as a museum piece.]
First order of business: the hard drive. It's an old PC, and I was intent on only having it for a little while until my finances lined up and I can get a new one, but I guess nobody buys a new hard drive with anything less than 500GBs anymore.
[sidebar: 500GBs. What the heck are you doing with 500 gigabytes worth of data on your portable computers, world? And that's the lower end of the storage scale. There's a laptop drive that's 3TB of storage. Three terabytes. Store that shit on an external drive. This is why you whine all the time when your shit gets stolen and thus all your data. And get off my lawn.]
Replacing hard drives on a typical PC is easy (if you've messed with enough computers and other hardware in your life) because the good souls who make the hardware tell you where the stuff are, in individual panels. You're looking for this:
[sidebar: You're awful, Service Center.]
So open up the panels and remove the old hard drive, replace it with the new one, and slot it back into place. If it doesn't slot back into place, you've already screwed up.
Now, boot up that thing and check the BIOS. If the BIOS can read the drive, well, at least you know the computer shop didn't give you a faulty drive. And you didn't screw up slotting the drive back into place.
It'll ask you for a boot device, though. So.
Thingy was running on Windows Vista (shhh.). As we all know by now, friends don't let friends run their computers on Windows Vista. And MS.FT just reneged on their promise to continue support for Vista by making its installation no longer available on their website, thus preempting its end of life. And Win10 is just...
[sidebar: A genuine OEM installation disc costs like 8k. For a single computer. Meanwhile, you can buy a perfectly working netbook with the OS installed (and sometimes a trimmed-down version of Office) for about 4k more. Business.]
Oh, those backup discs Windows won't leave you alone until you've created them? Turns out the backup to create a boot disc to reinstall Windows is a whole other backup option and not the one they keep harassing you to do. Read as: no, dear, you can't reinstall Windows with the backups you created. Thanks for trying.
You could choose to clone your existing drive, but that's presuming your old hard drive didn't die, and you have the accoutrements necessary to do this (basically a SATA/IDE-to-USB cable). Cloning will make life simpler, because it basically copies the drive, with all the files and installed software and whathaveyous on it, into a new hard drive. No need to install those drivers and reconfigure everything again. Again: this would be great if your original drive didn't die, and if you weren't starting with fucking Vista.
So: Linux.
There are several Linux distributions you can download and try out, all (most?) with the option to try them out with a Live CD first, and for the sake of this crap, I tried Elementary (which almost everyone raves about), Crunchbang, and Zorin. Most people would recommend Linux Mint, but it develops way too often for my taste, and they don't have rolling updates to make life simpler. Elementary is pretty, yes, and streamlined. But it was a bit slow. Sure, beggars can't be choosers, but come on now. I'm going to be using this for very complicated things.
[sidebar: Back on Vista, three applications could send that system crashing down on its 250GB HDD/1-2Gb RAM -- GIMP, Eclipse, and Scribus. I wasn't risking that shit on Elementary.]
Crunchbang is... well, it was fast. And it was very very neat. And how could I resist a Linux distro with releases that are named after Muppet characters? But it was Debian, and even as I tried it it seemed more suitable for a netbook. I was thinking of using it for an old HP Mini I was tasked of keeping alive (currently on XP), but development on it has seized, and, well, that solved that issue.
[sidebar: RIP, Crunchbang. At least you weren't bought out by a mysterious company that killed you from the face of the internet.]
Zorin isn't the prettiest, nor the most efficient, but it's lighter than Mint and has more flexibility, GUI-wise. Its software center also includes the system-heavy trio I previously mentioned, and comes with both a video editor and an office suite (Libre) pre-installed.
Oh! And Zorin already has WINE installed, which lets me run Windows installations on it, so that just made life so much simpler.
And yes, dear reader, Ubuntu can be installed beside a Windows installation. I think it can even be installed alongside OSX, but why would you do a thing like that.
[sidebar: My cousin had XP installed alongside OSX on her Macbook; when she asked me beforehand if it was possible, I almost slapped her. The blasphemy. And it wasn't even for the semi-valid excuse of work.]
Wow, you mutter under your breath, while also muttering, "nerd", what a waste of installation CDs. And that is what Rufus is for. Rufus is the greatest thing, in this whole exercise, because it creates boot disks and makes the USB a bootable device. In the day and age of netbooks and a refusal to have an external cd drive eyesore, Rufus is a lovely, lovely thing.
So. TL;DR:
1) EaseUS Partition Manager (GParted is also a good partitioning software, and comes preinstalled with some Linux distros, but I like EaseUS better)
2) Pick a Linux distro
3) Rufus
4) Easy BCD boot loader manager
5) uTorrent is available on Linux
Wait, why do I need a boot loader manager? This is when you have two operating systems installed on your computer, and since Windows is coded to ignore other existing systems, you'll need this so you get to have an option before Windows's splash screen shows up.
And partitioning software, what? One reason I loathed Vista was that it didn't allow me to partition my hard drive, which is usually recommended (at least, I would recommend it) so that the file system and the OS are running on two separate drives (even if just virtually). By keeping them separate, you can muck around with your files as much as you want and mess with the OS, and the systems won't interfere with each other. This makes it easier to defragment, and there will be less sectors that change periodically. And if you'll run two separate operating systems, you can choose to keep all the files on a single (separate) partition so both OS can read it.
And if you're going to install anything beside a Windows installation, install Windows first. Windows' boot record tends to overwrite any other boot record/system and mess with the existing system. It can be fixed, but why make life harder.
Giles: Ms. Calendar, I'm sure your computer science class is fascinating, but I happen to believe that one can survive in modern society without being a slave to the, um, idiot box.
Jenny: That's TV. The idiot box is TV. This is the *good* box!
(Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
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