OS Experiences While Upgrading my PC

I am currently dual booting Windows XP and Fedora Core 1. I recently upgraded my PC, actually, I more or less bought a new PC. New processor, new motherboard, new graphics card, new memory and so on. Basically, only my soundcard, hard drive and DVD-Rom made the cut into the new PC.My old PC had a VIA motherboard with an Accton Cheetah LAN card, and SDRAM and a Duron processor ran on top of everything.


The new PC has an NForce motherboard, with built in network and has DDR333 RAM. An Athlon XP proccessor proudly does duty here.


So, here I am, just bought a new machine, and I needed to get to using it. How where my experiences. Well, the were as follows.


I put the old hard drive into the new tower as a primary master, and added my new drive as slave, then I connected my 2 optical drives, CD writer and DVD-ROM together. I realise this arrangement may be less than optimal, and some school of thought says you should preferably connect eac hard drive as master, with the optical devices as slaves. Well, lets just say, the guys who made my ATX case, and the guys (or girls) who designed the IDE spec did not make this easy.


Anyway, after booting on the new PC, I came to the familiar grub, and I decided to try boot into Windows. I promptly got a blue screen. Yes, there is a blue screen (Why couldn’t Microsoft make it red to avoid the association) This screen basically means your PC is halted. An attempt to boot into safemode brought me right back to the blue screen. Ther was no progress here at all.


Darn it, I need to use this PC. What do I do? Boot into Linux? Would Linux pull it through where windows has failed? What are my chances? These were all questions making rounds in my poor head. Well, it doesn’t hurt trying, so I booted again, and chose Fedora as the boot destination this time around. Shockingly everything worked as it was supposed.


Kudzu promptly found all my new hardware, and promptly asked me what to do with missing hardware. A few seconds later, I was staring at a login prompt. But my Silver lining had a cloud as it were. The resolution was all wrong. The lettes and numbers were all too big. Thank God for redhat-config-xfree86. A minute later, I was staring at a flawless operating Fedora Core 1. The only problem I had was that the non-accelerated drivers for my graphics card were now default. That changed pretty quickly, and I am now back to my old OS, sans the slowness of course.


So what did I have to do with the Windows to make it work? I had to run recovery on it from the CD, and later had to redownload all the updates, including service pack 1 (since all the files had been overwritten).


I am not going to score anything, but Linux impressed me much. No problems whatsoever. Windows needed some ingenuity to get it working again. 2 years ago I would have simply reinstalled but I am more time-conscious now.


Does anyone else have any upgrade stories?

I would like to know if anyone’s experience mirrors my own.

95 Comments

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