Taking the plunge…

Ok, I spent most of Friday evening and yesterday archiving a bunch of old files to spare hard drives with my usb-ide cable. A 20gig drive has all the old files that I know I haven’t touched in forever. Old versions of websites, old documents, etc. Also dumped all my “my programs” stuff where I keep copies of programs I download to try. That pretty much filled that up and then it was all deleted from my D drive.

Moved all my photos to a 15gig drive - I may put them back on the hard drive once the switch is over, we’ll see. Copied all my MP3s to a 10gig - I’ll figure a way to back up my music to this drive every once in awhile from now on.

Defragged the D drive, it’s a 120gig that’s about 1/3 full at the moment. My external 120, Z drive will get formatted and ready for new backups once I’ve settled in.

My other spare drive is an 80gig, not 40 like I thought. I did split it roughly in half. Not sure why… just did for now.

So, I’m about to swap that for the current C drive and start loading Ubuntu on it. Now this is an old Gateway, P4-1.6 I think (sorry, forgot to check), and 512Kram. I know I may not *need* it with Ubuntu, but I want more ram. I am debating on spending a couple hundred dollars and adding to the ram (it’s old ram, so it’s expensive), or spending $4-500 and getting a new computer.

I was looking at an Acer at Best Buy yesterday… $470, AMD dual core processor, 1gig ram, 320gig SATA drive, 4USB, multi card reader and mini-USB ports on the front, 4USB, 1Firewire, network, sound on the back, along with VGA and HDMI output on the video… all this is built in to the motherboard. Oh, and a modem card which I’d probably ditch.

I want to do some checking, my new Samsung LCD monitor has HDMI input, so I’m wondering if I can run dual monitors on the one card. I’ve heard mixed stuff so far on the quality of the card for gaming… but I don’t game.

Anywho, gonna do some checking around yet… so while I may be installing on this box today, it may not be a permanent thing.