I inherited a Dell Pentium 4 – with barely minimal memory (256MB) and a laughable hard drive (40G) – the other day. It had a corrupted Windows XP Pro running on it, and it was S L O W. I mean really slow. So I unsuccessfully tried to reinstall Windows (in retrospect, why?), clean up the hard drive and test for malware, all without any hint of success.

I took the “radical” decision to uninstall Windows and install the popular Linux OS, Ubuntu. At first it did not want to get past 55% installation before it crashed, but a quick CD clean and disk/hard disk check proved to be just the ticket. I now sit here writing this entry on a new, faster machine. The interface is unusual, but logical and user-friendly.

I almost have a feeling of pride at getting it all to work, whilst rescuing an otherwise damned PC; best of all, I have a non-Windows computer.