My Computer Woes

The three week saga goes like this...

It started with my soundcard, which I still haven't resolved yet. I'm trying to see if I can get a new I/O card (or get it fixed) for my Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum. The soundcard itself is fine, but the I/O or "drive bay" card is fried (took me a week to figure that out). The reason I want to get the I/O card replaced or fixed is because this soundcard is widely supported by Linux--what I want to use to make music once Linux progresses further--and most of the other brands are not so widely supported.

Then WinXP died badly. I was stuck using my backup windows98 partition. Tried resizing the win98 partition using Partition Magic, but it wouldn't work, kept giving me errors. I would go online, figure out what the error was, fix the error, then try to resize again and I would get a new error. This happened for a few days and for several errors until I finally got it to work.

Then I tried to install XP several times and it wouldn't boot right. Then win98 got totally corrupted so I had to reinstall the entire system. I decided to leave 98 behind and dual boot WinXP (which I still need for music) and Linux. After a few days, after getting internet on XP, a worm or virus destroyed it, so I had to recover a previous working boot and reinstall my software all over again.

Then I tried to download openSUSE linux 10.1 to my laptop on my friend's cable, but everyone in the world is downloading it right now, so it took an entire day to get it.

Because I don't have a DVD burner on my laptop and I don't want to mess with the 6 CDs of openSUSE, I got a program that turns the 6 CDs into DVDs. But I need linux to do it. I thought I could use my Knoppix live CD on my desktop (which has a DVD writer) to do it, but realized I couldn't because Knoppix Live doesn't have write capabilities. After finding an abandoned computer on the street, I tore out its 15 GB hard drive, put it in my desktop, installed Vector Linux on it, transfered the 6 CDs to it, and tried to turn the 6 CDs into one DVD. But lo and behold, I need a few more programs that Vector Linux doesn't have in order to do so. I gave up and started burning the ISOs to CD--and ran out of CDs.

So today I'm going to buy some more blank CDs, finish burning the ISOs, install SUSE, and make sure the Linux GRUB boots both Windows XP and openSUSE. Tomorrow, I'll try updating XP before the worm/virus gets me again with the help of PC-Cillin and Windows firewall.

Then I need to find out if Netzero works in Wine under openSUSE. If not, I need to find another way to get online in linux.

Finally, I'll have to download a few licensed codecs to linux and makes sure everything is working.

By the end of the week, hopefully, all this will be done and I'll have a working computer, an internet connection, updated Operating Systems, and free time at last.