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Like any geek, I am not one to judge a piece of software until it lands on my desk and I have a chance to play with it. Windows Vista was no exception, and since it came pre-loaded on my new laptop, I couldn't say no to what I would call a "test drive." Let me say now that I have already crashed!

Flashback a few months ago, to me picking up the box which held my new laptop from Staples. An HP with a 17 inch widescreen, the dv9250us model. It has a gig of ram, 120 gigs of storage, great graphics, and a dual-core 64 bit processor. I was excited indeed. When I got home, I booted up, and was greeted with Vista Home Premium (32 Bit on a 64 bit laptop...how cheap of HP). After getting the annoying out-of-the box experience thing out of the way, I went to doing my normal fresh install procedures (install Firefox, run XP-Antispy, among other things). As I proceeded to install software, I was already irritated by the UAC - User Access Control - asking me every 5 seconds if I was sure about what I was doing. A Google search later and I had disabled User Access Control (run msconfig).

All was well...or was it? I had trouble running some of my old tried and true applications, and didn't have very much available memory, on a laptop with 1 gigabyte! CTRL+ALT+DEL opened the process manager, and I saw that the sidebar took 80 megabytes of memory, alongside many XP-esque useless processes. Some boot tweaking later, and I had a useful computer. Eventually I started using Kubuntu alongside Vista. The re-partitioning made Vista throw a CRCDisk error, and I ended up having to run a chkdsk from the recovery partition (which took 7gb of my hard drive space). Fixed...And Kubuntu flew by Vista when it came to performance and compatiblity. I couldn't complain, as Kubuntu with Wine could run more Windows programs (old ones anyway) than Vista!

Flash to a couple days ago, where I am running a hard drive wipe utility to find chunks of old deleted files and free up some space. Things went awry, and I ended up corrupting my partition table. This was a problem, but it truly was a blessing in disguise. I managed to use Gparted Live CD to move things around and create a 75gb partition that used fat32, so both Linux and Windows could read and write to it. I copied my essential files from both operating systems there, and then repartitioned again, ending up with a 15gb partition for Windows, and a 15gb partition for Linux. The 75gb partition stayed as storage. There was still the annoying little HP Recovery partition, which I later merged to my storage partition. Did I say "partition" enough there?

Anyway, I now have XP rather than Vista this time, and the performance increase is astounding. I have tuned it to my specifications, but it is very fast, and all of my applications actually run. It took some hunting to find the drivers, but I ended up finding them, after some strife. I am now pleased with the Windows side of things.

I have also re-installed Kubuntu and set up my old preferences by copying my profile and etc folders over. Everything looks good, and I just have to install some packages and setup some drivers (which is going to take less time than dealing with Vista did). I highly suggest Kubuntu, as a Linux OS, as it runs fast on most computers. Older computers would probably benefit more from Xubuntu, though, but I haven't tried it.

That all said, I'm ready to go back to college with my rejuvenated laptop. It is fast, compatible, and can run everything short of Mac applications (I'll work on that another time).

Just a parting thought: DON'T BUY VISTA!

-Matt Parnell
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