Yeah, my Linux machine finally gave it up. It was about 10 or 11 years old and had been a good machine for all those years when I abused it with Windows XP until I discovered Linux and the Open Source Community. That’s when I rediscovered the web so to speak. With Linux.

Well, the ‘ol girl was whining and making those odd noises we older folk tend to make when awakened from our slumber each morning. Coffee wasn’t getting her in a better mood either. Nor coaxing her into another day of exploring the feed-reader, email, design projects or anything else that came across the “desk” on any given day.

No, she was going out slowly but surely and there was nothing I could do to save her. She will be missed.

Now that she is gone, I’m left to do my daily tasks on my laptop that runs Vi$ta. On the one hand, I DO have a backup in the laptop but on the other, I sorely miss my Linux desktop. Another good point is that the laptop has 2 hard drives so I’m looking into installing Linux on the 2nd one.

Thing is, with Vi$ta, I’m a bit concerned how the two will “play together”. I’ve heard some disturbing stories about the 2 not recognizing each other or one thing or another like that.

Before any of you say to dump Vi$ta and just install Linux, hold up a sec. I still need a backup in case of trouble. That’s one reason why I still have the laptop in the first place.

If the cost to replace any parts comes in way less that the cost of just buying a new desktop machine and installing Linux in it, I’ll go that route but right now, the news isn’t that good. So for now, I’ll see about getting the two to play nice together when I install my next distro of Linux on the 2nd hard drive.

You may remember from a previous post of mine that I was considering selling my laptop (Toshiba X205-SLi) on eBay. Well, I tried doing just that except it turned out to be one of the worst experiences I’d had in a long time.

Let me fill you in:

I set up an account with PayPal first to allow for payment if the laptop should sell. I was being optimistic I suppose seeing as the times we’re in at the moment are taxing (no pun intended) our finances almost to the hilt depending on income.

After the PayPal account was set up I then set up an account at eBay. Talk about a confusing website. Never the less, I got the thing listed and set it for a 7 day auction. I just wanted to sell it to the first one who would cough up my asking price but for some reason, I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Oh well, no biggie. more…

If you’ve read this blog any recently, you’ll remember I bought a new laptop with Vista as the OS (operating system) on it. Well, the laptop in itself is great! I love the look and feel of it and the keyboard layout works well for my hands. I’m using it mostly for my projects plus a few games and I was enjoying using it even with Vista’s annoyances. Until lately that is.

The Toshiba has 2 gigs of memory from the factory installed and is the same amount I have on my desktop machine that runs both Ubuntu and XP Pro. Thing is, the laptop will nearly run out of memory while running Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Notepad++ along with having some open windows for searching for images, docs, etc.

I’ll get a warning box telling me that Vista is low on memory and I need to save then close any open applications. That’s a load for Vista? I never get this on my desktop and I’ve had way more apps and windows running on it no matter if I’m in Ubuntu or XP!

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, right now as I type this…Vista’s memory is hovering right around the half-way mark. All I have open is Firefox and Google’s desktop app. That’s it. more…