ubuntu in my laptop (acer aspire 5500z)

Yes, I've an antique Acer Aspire 5500z laptop whose BIOS password I don't know. :)
Really disgusting specs but I love it even after broken right arrow key(I broke it). I was facing glitches with my work as earlier my laptop was infected with viruses. I tried installing windows 8 but it didn't work out. I was left with no access to my personal files and programs and most important media content on my laptop @ home.

I had to took a decision. It's been years since I've known ubuntu, from the time it used to get shipped for free. I guess the version was 6 or something. I had shipped and wasted nearly close to 100 CDs and use the logos as I like logo rather than linux at that time. I had all flavors CD, ubuntu, kubuntu, edubuntu everything till they stopped shipping CDs. ;)

I had installed it a few times earlier but there's tons of things you are familiar with windows and all your software and small utilities that you love on windows. I don't hate windows specifically because I never paid anything for it (except for blank CDs). With every version they launched, there was some guy cracking the whole licensing stuff and helping poor guys with installation. Ahh, I'm going off the topic.

I burned ubuntu 11.04 (waiting for 11.10) ISO on a blank CD and started installing. Since, the drive is totally worn out and I can even see some marks on lens of reader, it didn't get played smoothly. I was stuck at installation. Then I remembered, wubi, the cute little utility that lets you run ubuntu alongside windows without partitioning. I installed ubuntu using wubi. And then using ubuntu startup disk manager, I created my sanDisk cruzer micro flash drive as a start-up media. Again, I didn't know that my laptop's BIOS supports USB boot until that day.

I plugged in my sanDisk cruzer and also the CD and rebooted and yippe, it accepted the install. I formatted my whole 60GB HDD as I had taken backup of almost everything. So, i'm now totally on ubuntu. I'm going to install macbuntu to give it an awesome look. I won't say I'm loving it as of now as I had to install many things to get to my normal work routine. And there are certain things which I've noticed in 1 day.

1. torrents runs faster, you get faster download speeds (i'm using default torrent application with ubuntu)
2. even in high loads, i don't see/feel cpu fan running or howling. either it's not controlling it or it's keeping it cool
3. media files play fine and smooth as i've installed the restricted ubuntu pack
4. chromium  browser, seriously amazing speed. Flash also works fine after i installed plugin.

The rest, i'll keep checking/testing and i'll keep updating. So far, smooth ride with ubuntu. Let's hope things stay this way and i keep exploring new things.

windows 8 install: 2, 4, 8, 16!!

A few days ago Microsoft launched developer preview of their latest operating system named as Windows 8!

After so successful and fast selling Windows 7, Microsoft is trying to build more focus on overall user experience with their operating systems. Geeky me, I did download Windows 8 32-bit (my old acer aspire 5500z is 32-bit). And since, my great friend had infected my system with 3 notorious viruses namely W32.Changeup, W32.Stuxnet!lnk, I thought of installing it.

My laptop doesn't read CD/DVD(s) smoothly, so I copied the extracted ISO into my D drive. Since, it's all infected and these stupid viruses don't allow me to run my laptop in normal mode, I copied everything in very slow "safe mode" of windows xp. It took, nearly 1.5 hours to copy 2.75 GB of data from a transcend (stupid) pendrive to my (almost 7 year old) hitachi 60GB hdd.

Anyway, after copying I launched setup.exe and it was checking system for its requirements and it failed!


I was so shocked to see that because my laptop is 1.7Ghz, 2GB RAM which fits the basic minimum but since my hdd is partitioned as 15GB and 40GB, it failed.
Windows 8 basically required 16GB for installation! I don't know what all is going to be there.

So, now I'm left with a unstable windows xp laptop on which I would have to repartition hdd so that it fits Windows 8 requirements.

Keep looking up this space for more. I'll update my experiences with it.
btw, I would probably format my hdd for ubuntu 11.04 install later :P