Computer people, opinions?

You should have been a real doctor-----of mechanical engineering.

Tw

You are officially a member of geekdom.

Don't bother with floppy systems today will reboot from CD.

I wouldn't bother with many partitions. Too much software expects to be on "C" and argues with you if it isn't there. If you keep good disc hygiene (keep your working files in a single folder, or two), you should have any trouble with back-up and recovery. 

"ghosting" is good if you have alot of unique system set-up that you've done. If you are using mostly off the shelf software, it's really better to do a disaster recovery from the original discs. Prevents inadvertant retention of viruses or other nasties. 

Nice system! Have some fun with it. 

First off, nice rig. What G card you do with?

questions:

1. I never Ghost, I think it's more of a pain then what it's worth. If you want to, do it after you install all your "Core" programs. Anything you will for sure reinstall if the system crashes.

2. You can only go RAID with multiple Hard drives. So unless you buy another, then you can't go RAID. Personally with SATA, unless you are doing heavy photoshopping or something else the requires massive disk seeking, then RAID is unneeded, unless you are running a RAID 1, which is basicly making the 2nd drive a clone of the first so if one drive physcially fails, you still have a working copy. RAID 1 does not protect against software corruption tho, as changes are made to both drives.

3: Yes. I always run 2 partitions or 2 seperate drives. One is for the OS and all program files. The second is for files. That way, if I have to reinstall windows, I can do a full wipe on the OS partition/disk and not worry about backing up files. Also if windows completely dies on me and I have to wipe the disk without being able to boot off it, I can do so without losing important data. To do it, when you install windows it will ask you want partition you want to install to. Use that tool to create two partitions. Then tell it to install to the first one. Once installed you can format the second partition through "my computer."

4. I tried to go floppy less but it lasted a month. I had a firmware issue with my DVD burner that required you to boot off a disk to update it. Problem was it was the only bootable drive besides my HD, so I had to buy a floppy for that reason. That's been the only time I've used it. If your BIOS supports booting from USB, then a flash drive can serve the purpose.

I have never put apps on their own partition. Mainly because the regestry is still on the windows partition and linked to that installation of windows. You can make backups of the reg, but I find it easier to just reinstall my key programs when I do a fresh install. Besides, I don't wind up reinstalling half the crap I have on it at the time I wipe it. That's part of the reason I wipe in the first place.  I also keep a folder on the document drive that I use to hold a copy of all the latest drivers.  When I update one, I just download it to that folder.  That way if I do reinstall I don't have to go searching for them all.  They are right there.  Kind of handy when your network card doesn't have a cookie-cutter driver on the windows install CD.  Learned that one the hard way.

So I'd leave your drive the way it is right now. Just right click on "my documents" and change the target over to the other drive and everything will be cool.

You lost me at "Windoze XP"... get Linux on that bad boy... down with Microsoft.

Oh and no to RAID, yes to partition, and no to floppy (Get a CD-RW if that DVD drive doesn't).

bts 

open office takes care of a lot of that stuff. 

as for which distro....really depends on what you are familiar with.  I'me currently using Suse, but have run Unbuntu, Red Hat, Free BSD, and Slackware.  They all get the job done. 

If you love this stuff, you could do everything you suggested and what everyone else suggests. There is no right or wrong as long as you don't open attachments, run anti-virus, run anti-spyware, run auto-update and have a router. When dealing with your home system, I always say K.I.S.S. , unless you have an inordinate amount of time and you love to geek out.

I do not like to geek out, so I am still running a 5 year old machine with Win 2000 Pro and no issues (knock on wood). I have a second hard drive that stores all of my files and I burn the keepsakes. Yes, I am old school, but it works and I spend little monitor time compared to family time. 

I could go on for hours.  A few good ones were mentioned.  Mandriva's nice too (http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/community/) that even has a flash tutorial on installation.  Linux users are fond of saying that the only difference between it and Windows is that Linux expects you to be able to think to use it... and in return it doesn't crash every chance it gets.  

Your best bet is to partition (or better yet get a second HD) and  have both on so you can ween yourself of windows.  Going cold turkey can be very frustrating.  I have two boxes because my wife is trapped on the dark side.

bts 

easy to do.  Just throw to more partitions after C.  One for Linux and one for swap, or if you have 2 drives, put the linux partition on one drive and swap on the other.  Install windows and get it all set up then install linux to the other partition.  Most distros come with LILO or GRUB and will automaticlly set it up.  When my computer boots it brings up the grub boot screen.  I have 5 seconds to tell it to boot into Suse before it continues to load windows.

I'm running Suse 8 and love it.  They did a really good job with it.  I especially like YaST (yet another stupid thing).  It's an update utility that lets you browse availible libraries and install them automaticly. It's a big time saver.

If you want to try different versions, they have live CD's for most of them.  It's a CD image you burn and boot off of.  Will let you run the OS and play around with it without actually installing anything. 

Excuse me, could you rephrase that and this time use ENGLISH???  Thank you.  

Glad there are those techno geeks that understand all that.

only if it's RED 

what an awesome thread! 

 i say ubuntu for linux.  but if you want to try lots, go for it.  however, in all likelihood you'll end up choosing one so you probalby don't want to have N partitions for linuxes that you're just trying.

 for that i would recommend running vmware on your windows, just try all the linuxes you want, whichever looks best then you can do your permanent install on a HD partition.

 you can get a free vmware 30 day trial, and they don't care if you just keep doing it.  i know a guy who worked there, and they were happy when people just serially downloaded the trial version.