Ubuntu and WinXP

[Eric Dunbar]

Hi square eyes:

On 10/29/05, squareyes <squareyes at internode.on.net> wrote:
> Eric Dunbar wrote:
> >
> >Don't try to re-install it if you value your friendship!

> (very small 620 people), as the nearest Linux user I know is 50 k
> away, and with the price of diesel, that's too far.
>  Good to bounce off someone else, so I suppose my trying to get him to use
> Linux was a tad selfish :-)

Maybe find him a cheap computer on which Linux can be installed and he
can safely play with it without endangering his "real" computer? He
could even run the Linux computer as a headless computer and access it
via VNC (and, if he was a Mac OS X user he could use X11 to connect to
the xclient apps on the Linux machine ;-) (trying to figure out the
client-server paradigm in x.org/x11 is quite the challenge :-).

> I think my friend is a candidate for some major repairs to his computer,
> it's lost data in the past, and has some big crashes, Win XP has been
> re-installed
> a number of times, but he doesn't think there is anything wrong.
> Personally my machine (4 years old) hasn't been shutdown for nearly 5
> months now,
> and I haven't had any problems that weren't easily fixed,
> ( next shutdown will be when a copy of 5.40 arrives) as I said I am a
> newbie, have found
> with the excellent help from this list that anything that has cropped up
> has been easily overcome, command line is new to me, but have a far more
> stable
> system than I ever did with Win 98 SE.
> Thanks again for all the help.
> Take Care
> Winton

Some things that come to mind that have caused computer users (of all
stripes, especially Windows) problems in the past:
1. He must never simply power down the computer; the "shut down"
routine must run its course;
2. NEVER install P2P software onto the computer that is "free" as in
beer and not "free" as in speech (source of most of the problems I've
seen on Windows in recent years);
3. don't install software where you don't know what is being
installed, and without doing due-dilligence research to ensure it does
not contain spyware;
4. Make sure the latest Windows patches have been applied; and,
5. upgrade to XP Pro!!!

Eric.