My local utility left a note on my door last Mon. and said they going to do some routine maint. on Thurs. from 9am to 3pm, during that time no electrical service. I did the smart thing and Thurs. morning unplugged my computer before I went to work, turned the thermostat down to nuthin and left the house. When I got home it was cold in here but after changing the digital clocks, I plugged my computer in and punched the start button and nuthin happens. Plugged the lamp into the circuit and it works but not the computer. I don't know what I did but somehow I trashed the computer.

I've had this computer since 2002, so decided to chuck it anyway without having anyone check it out, it probably wouldn't be worth the fee anyway and it was dang slow and getting slower. I ran a Linux system on it after formatting the hard drive and it's been Linux for me over others. I love it so I decided to find out about getting a new computer tower with a blank hard drive and instal a fresh Linux system on it. Over $600 for the least expensive unit at the local computer talent agency (yes they have talent to convince me to buy the most expensive/least expensive tower they had) I didn't buy it. Went to the office supply place and got a HP all-in-one computer for $429. Really sweet, just a monitor and a keyboard on the desk top, just like the Apple computers we have at work.

It runs Windows 8 and that's where the sweetness stops, very abruptly too. The most arcane operating system I've ever encountered. I swear Obama had something to do with it. It's seemingly set up so that you can't do anything computer-like on it. Seems mostly for social networking and entertainment, but the worst thing is the way you have to search for just about anything computer-like you want to do. It's not even easy to put it into sleep mode. You have to run the mouse arrow up the top right hand corner of the screen then some menu items show up, you run the mouse down to the power button at the bottom of the screen, punch that and you get three modes, sleep, power off and restart.

Instead of small iconic buttons on the included programs (which are mostly web-based) there's nothing. The programs have no discernable means of shutting them off. You have to run the mouse arrow over to the left hand corner of the screen and then what ever programs are running (like the last one you were on but couldn't shut off) show up momentarily and you have to click on one of them to remove the one you're on. Once they're on that menuish thing on the left hand then you can leftclick with the mouse and close them individually. Pull-your-hair-out convenience!!!

Ok so to cure my bowel moving experience of wondrous heights I decided to partition the hard drive and open up a spot for my Linux system to reside. As Vinnie would say (or is it Elvis) easy peasy! I got the hard drive partitioned in a snap they even have an application for doin it. What I didn't know is they also have a cure for people wanting to put alternate operating systems on it.

It's called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and it does not allow my Linux boot disk to do anything at all. The original intent of UEFI was to block viruses cloaked as operating systems? I think, anyway I can't get into the system to shut it off or disable it and now I'm back to square one. I truly do not take well to Windows 8 but I was able to get PointBlank running on it, I wasn't able to on my Linux system and that's a huge plus.

I swear Windows 8 is such a dumbed down system apparently aimed at 6 year olds with no computer history, but with lots of gaming history. No little icons but great big tiles with subjects like video, people, messaging, mail, and a whole bunch of tiles devoted to purchasing other "apps" as they call them. OMG this is so insanely.....I want my Linux!!!

There
off
my
chest
Suz

Suz,
Is it possible to find a two or three year old system in the local want ads? If so get a system for $100 and load it with Linux. I used my old Pentium 4 with 250 meg of ram to do it - I did finally upgrade to 1 gig for ram but it has two hard drives - one for DOS, yes I still use it, and one for Linux (Lubuntu) a light version of Ubuntu and it is up to date and runs flawlessly.
I did get Firefox for it because it came with "Chromium" which is a version of Google Chrome and I don't support Google at all.

PaulS Ya know I was just talking to my nephew (computer geek) and he said since I took out my old hard drive (it didn't fry)I could actually use it by just plugging it into a hub and have 2 hard drives on here. I might just do that. I already have some sort of hub (I've never used it) that's made for transferring files between drives. I like the power this new machine has, it's very fast and very quiet so maybe I can utilize both systems that way. I used to run Windows and Ubuntu side by side then I got rid of Windows altogether on that drive. It screwed the drive a bit I'm sure because getting rid of Windows was sloppy, it never swiped it clean but it ran ok. This system has 4 gigabites of ram and my other computer had more like 8 megabites or so. It ought to handle some extended function I'd think. I love FireFox...one of the first things I did on here was instal FireFox and forget Explorer.

Suzanne wrote:

PaulS Ya know I was just talking to my nephew (computer geek) and he said since I took out my old hard drive (it didn't fry)I could actually use it by just plugging it into a hub and have 2 hard drives on here. I might just do that. I already have some sort of hub (I've never used it) that's made for transferring files between drives. I like the power this new machine has, it's very fast and very quiet so maybe I can utilize both systems that way. I used to run Windows and Ubuntu side by side then I got rid of Windows altogether on that drive. It screwed the drive a bit I'm sure because getting rid of Windows was sloppy, it never swiped it clean but it ran ok. This system has 4 gigabites of ram and my other computer had more like 8 megabites or so. It ought to handle some extended function I'd think. I love FireFox...one of the first things I did on here was instal FireFox and forget Explorer.

I know how you feel.... I messed with a puter that had w8 on it and didn't care for it at all. Thank goodness my oldest Daughter is in the puter business and could fix me up with W7 if need be, cause that's what's on all my puters now. I also run 2 hard drives on my main computer and have nothing to do with internet explorer etc. I use Firefox for surfing and Thunderbird for email, and I also run a couple of hard drives to keep things separate...!

Suz

Ubuntu added support for UEFI secure boot as of version 12.10.

Thanks Omni I'll look into that, I've got 10.04

Microsoft looks at the success of Android system and thought to emulate them.
Then again I guess dumbing down operating systems is inevitable.
Nowadays, whenever some one talk about "using computer" is either to surf the web or rudimentary uses of some mundane word processing or spread sheet.
No longer the word mean to utilize it to solve complex computation or the arcane skill of programming.

I feel your pain Suz, I need to use WIndows because most programs I use only runs on windows.
I still stick with XP, and if there is no choice I then use 7, but I hate them.

Ubuntu is best right now.

I just hooked up my hard drive from my dead computer to this new one and it won't show the partition that I have Ubuntu on, let alone boot from it. I need to get it to boot from it to get to my old Ubuntu. Looked for the Ubuntu version 12.10 at the book store and they don't have any Ubuntu books. Going to buy a disk online.

The thing with Windows is, it gets on the internet without you knowing it and scrounges around picking stuff up here and there and who knows what the heck is going on. (well there's lots of other stuff I don't like about it) Anyway I'll get the bootable disk and make a dual-boot system I guess, or side by side if I can figure that one out. I want to use PointBlank and some other Windblows stuff too so I can't just wipe the slate clean and only have Ubuntu.

I run VM on a server with a client running windows with no NET connection (unless I turn it on) and another client running Ubuntu for browsing etc.
Both runs simultaneously.

Suz, you can download Ubuntu 12.10 as a bootable ISO from their website Then burn it to a DVD and boot that to install. The version of Lubuntu that I am running is also 12.10 and it was downloaded to my old Ubuntu 10.1 machine and installed from the DVD.
Be sure to save any files that you want to keep before you change operating systems because there is no update; it just clears everything and installs the new version. If you want to update (I tried to) you have to go through three different versions - mine hung on the second one. I had to use the old disk to get back to 10.1 and then I had already lost it all.

I was downloading it last night, it's huge like 600+mb, after 2 1/2 hrs it was only 25% done. Ended up ordering a disk, they're cheap anyway. I can't get to the files on my other hard drive but maybe I can find a way some time down the road. The partition doesn't make itself visible although I did find my desktop files and my document files on there and downloaded them. From now on I'm keeping everything saved on a separate back-up disk, seems the only way to insure you get things back.

Windows can not see ex2, ex3 or ex4 file systems on Linux natively, but here are a few tool that will help windows see "linux filesystems".

www.howtoforge.com/acc...om-windows

SmartyPantz!!! Thanks!! Don't know if it'll work on my external drive because I'm not booted to it, only mounted it, but I'll see what I can do. In other words I can't execute programs from it, but if I download it from my computer maybe it can scan my external drive for partitions. I'm gettin in deep now.....

Thanks Omni

Here is what you need Suz as you can plug in your external linux drive via usb and mount it under windows drive manager to see and write your linux partitions. But first you've got to install the software, it has a small footprint and it's free. When your done with the drive you can use windows drive manager or the little icon to safely remove usb drives. You use explorer to view files. Be aware though that it will install as many drive letters as need to enable windows to mount the drive.

www.fs-driver.org/index.html

I dunno if I wanna mess with that one, it doesn't mention Windows 8 in the compatibility list. It mentions Windows 2008, is that same as Windows 8? which came out in Oct. 2012?