Leaving Microsoft Behind...

Well, after nearly 30 years of dealing with the DOS Shell known as Windows, I'm finally kicking it to the curb.

My decade-old Dell's hard drive crashed recently, so it forced us to look at our options.  They included:
          - Replacing the hard drive and reinstalling XP.
          - Buying a new PC with Windows 7 or 8.
          - Buying a Mac and moving away from Microsoft.
          - Replacing the hard drive and installing Linux.
          - Buying a new PC and installing Linux.

While I would have liked to make the move to a Mac, they're simply out of our price range.  Maybe someday...maybe never.  However, I really, REALLY, like the idea of not having to worry about viruses, and taking full advantage of the processor (i.e. not having to always run Anti-Virus and/or Spyware programs in the background).  So, we've opted for the last two options listed above.

My current laptop has a 32-bit processor, so we're going to install Linux on that, and give it to our daughter.  She'll have everything she'll need for the final 2 years of High School.  For my wife and I, we're going to get a new Dell Inspiron N411Z (with 6GB of RAM, and a 750GB 7200rpm hard drive).

Ah, but what "flavor" of Linux to install, right?  Well, according to the info at DistroWatch, there are over 700 different Linux Distributions!  Yikes!!  That's obviously way too many to look over.  So we narrowed things down to some of the most popular distributions.

In the end, my wife and I decided to go with Linux Mint 13 (Maya): KDE.  And because we like to keep physical discs of most of the things we install, I even ponied up the money to buy the Live-Boot Discs, as well as the current Software Repository.  I know, I could have downloaded them, but all we currently have available are our work PCs, and neither one of us felt comfortable using them in that manner.

So, for the past week or so I've been reading up on Linux, Mint, and KDE.  It's been 10 years since I've dealt with a UNIX/Linux system, so I have a bit of catching up to do...and I'll need to get up-to-speed quickly so I can show my wife and daughter what they'll need to know as well (mainly how to use LibreOffice).

So, that's what's new here.  If you're interested in the Peavey Renown 400 project, that's still "in progress."  Nothing really newsworthy to comment on as yet.  I'll letcha know when things change.  

Peace, and God Bless!