Taking the plunge!

After much fiddling and thinking, I have come to a ground breaking decision (for me, that is!!!).

I have been breaking my head over my system running Windows XP from quite sometime now. Even after setting up so much protection using the Big3 : Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Internet Security, my PC succumbed to a bunch of viruses and a dozen trojans and it finally crashed!

Then followed the famous procedure >> Format HDD >> Reinstall OS >> Update OS (Oh! SP3 is released) >> Find (or rather ‘Hunt’ would be the right term for a 7 year old machine like mine!) and Install Drivers >> Install the Big3 >> Update the Big3>> Restore Backups. Phew!!!

Two days,  a million updates and zillion restarts later, I finally have a working machine or so I thought. I still have to install (i hate that name) Nero to burn my CD’s and DVD’s - which seems to be the only thing I am doing this vacation - and MS Office to do something productive. Hey, I missed out on Adobe Reader. Then comes VLC Player and some other apps. In fact, its not some, its many!

All was well and good for 3 months. 3 loooooooonnnnnng months. The updated Anti-Virus did its job. Since, I was taking some precautions, it had nothing much to do apart from catching hold of a few common Powerpoint.exe’s and other trojans from USB drives. The Anti-Spyware was content with my browser cookies and MS log files.

One fine day, the PC froze and me too. “It’s just 3 months”, i thought. Not to accept defeat this time, I rebooted. Everything looked fine. I burned the midnight oil to scan the entire harddisk. Then came the turn of my Anti-Spyware to scan. By then it was Good morning. Both these experts (as CNET says) did not get hold of anything. I concluded, may be XP is going through its periods!

Then again, the next day it froze. But not completely. My friend - the good old mouse pointer was running around freely on the desktop. Whats happening? One of my friend (supposedly a geek) suggested - try defragmenting your disks. Ah! the ultimate solution. I did just that. Mr Defragmentor of Windows XP advised me to defragment every disk I analysed as if Microsoft is getting paid for every session. It worked! The PC was back again to catch the flight!

Two weeks passed without any issues. Then, the ultimate happened. The PC booted till the welcome screen and kept on welcoming me for the next 4 hours! Wow, what a welcome. I felt I was on cloud 69, since Microsoft Windows (the worlds most popular operating system) felt I should be welcomed whole heartedly. So long was the welcome that I thought Windows might be seriously busy searching its heart on Live! Search.

Ok >> Force Shut down >> Reboot.

Again, Windows did not forget to welcome me. This time I decided to play ‘Blink’ with it, just to see how long can it sustain. I went about my usual chores at home, went shopping, had dinner, Good Night, Good Morning, had breakfast, read the newspaper and yet - its welcoming me!

That did it. I lost it completely. I would have banged my PC but good sense prevailed in a thought that Windows is a software and cannot be physically banged! That day, I made sure that I talked with some geeks from our college and visited the nearby cyber cafe. I Googled, visited blogs, forums and finally came to a  decision.

It shall be Fedora for me! The love of my life (or rather my PC), my sweetheart…

I am not completely new to the Linux thingy. I (my PC) had passing affairs (read : flings) with many Linux distributions earlier. The shipped Ubuntus, kubuntus, PCQLinux and an older Fedora (which I had so meticulously downloaded on my 128 kbps line) all had a day or two with my PC. But none stayed. Maybe the relationship was not strong enough to sustain the rigours of daily computing!

That was then. But things change, dont they? After many considerations I decided that Fedora 9 will be the new OS on my system! Luckily for me, one of the geek had the installation DVD too!

Great! Here I am, taking the plunge into the world of Linux lovers. This time (hopefully) for a longer run…

Wish me good luck!!!