Thursday, April 13, 2006

Cleaning up Windows

Introduction


The first PC I got to know and love was a 286 running MS-DOS 3.1. That was before Windows existed in the personal computer market. The computer in question had no HDD, no mouse, no modem. They were available at the time, but expensive and uncommon for PC's.

I devoured the DOS 3.1 manual and even experienced the evil that was Edlin. On through Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98se, Me (I'm so ashamed), 2000, and XP, I've seen Windows in all its moods. I've tweaked it, hacked it, and re-installed it more times than I care to recall. However, I regretfully admit that I have never met that intriguing penguin named Tux.

It's time for a change. Being a rather ambitious and masochistic techie, I have decided to move to Slackware Linux. This blog is my journal of the move, and hopefully a guide for those who come after.

Why did I choose Slackware?


I took a look through DistroWatch.com, hunting for information on the various distros of Linux. My first consideration was popularity, because I know I'm going to need all the documentation I can get. The larger the user community, the more documentation. I found the DistroWatch article Top Ten Distributions.

The command prompt has been my friend for over 15 years, so I wanted a distro that didn't rely strongly on a GUI. I also wanted solid stability and security. Slackware especially caught my eye because DistroWatch said it has a "strong adherence to UNIX principles". Which I figure must mean, it's as far from Windows and Mac as you can get. Looks like the choice for me.

I'm sure many people would suggest I cut my teeth on a more user-friendly distro. Well, I love tweaking my OS for hours at a time, and I'm not going to do that if I know I eventually intend to switch to another distro. Besides, as I said before, I'm masochistic.

Cleaning up Windows


The computer I will be using for the Linux install is a laptop with an AMD64 processor (which means I'll be using Slamd64), 512MB RAM, 80Gig HDD. Ideally, one would install a second HDD, so that each OS can play on its own disk. But since my computer is a laptop, I don't have the luxury of adding a second internal HDD. I can't afford an external HDD. So, it's time for some serious backup.

As I go along, writing data to DVDs, I'm also nuking unessential programs and defragging. I hope to make XP as small as possible. The less data I need to shift around my HDD, the better. My hope is to install Slackware on the primary partition, so that I can simply nuke the secondary partition (containing Windows) on that magical day when I don't need Windows any more.


Pieces of software that have made my life easier:


Freeware. 1-4a Rename is a priceless little tool if you're anal about how file names appear. This is especially important for renaming files so that spaces are replaced by underscores (e.g., My File.doc -> My_File.doc). After all, from what I've read, Linux *hates* spaces in file names.
Settings to replace spaces with underscores in 1-4a Rename:
Change to expert mode (F2). In the peach-colored box, the first checkbox is 'Replace". Check this. In the first text field, put one space. (" " without the quotes). In the second text field, put one underscore. ("_" without the quotes). In the drop-down box, choose 1st occurance. Don't check any of the other checkboxes within the peach-colored box.
Freeware. Karen's Directory Printer. With this utility, I can quickly grab a listing of all directories, with their sizes. After dumping the results into Excel and sorting them, I can easily see which directories are munching up the most drive space. These directories are my primary targets.

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