Updating Vista...

Vista has been utterly slow and it's taking days to update it.  This just references the issue I had with installing SP1.  It first won't show up in the Windows Update but apparently it's a matter of installing all the updates it needs.  When it did show up on Windows Update, it kept trying to install and it wasn't happening.  This article helped out.  I downloaded SP1 and SP2 from the article and am going through installing them via safe mode (F8 on startup).

Plan B

Over all, I'm not particularly worried about the data on my laptop.  Gotta say, it makes playing around with it easier.  Fiddling around with the letters didn't work so now I'm reading up this blog post to set the Acer Recovery partition as active.  Let's see how it goes.

Goodbye Gutsy... or not.

Sometimes, when you're tired, you do something really, really dumb.  So I decided to clean out the Linux partition on my old Acer laptop.  I had also discovered that the DVD drive can't read anything and the Acer recovery partition is throwing a fit on me by complaining about the dreaded missing GUI (*.WSI) files and it was giving me the error reason 0xa0000001.  Before it had dawned upon me too, I had made GRUB totally useless by purging the Linux partition (Way to go, idiot!).

To boot up my Windows Vista partition, I downloaded unetbootin and setup my 1 GB usb stick with Super Grub Disk.  Allow unetbootin to install the SGD because SGD2 doesn't work with it.

From SGD, the first thing I tried is to fix the Windows boot which would effectively kill GRUB on the mbr, but this did not work.  Using the Boot & Tools menu got me to select Boot Partition and start up my old Vista install.  At least I got to boot it!  Now to make my recovery partition work!

For resource, I'm going with this forum thread.  This reminded me that the way the partitions where setup when I got them was that I had an C: partition with the label ACER and a D: partition with the label DATA.  Since all the drive letters were mucked up badly, and Acer doesn't do a good job to make their recovery routines robust, I think I'll try to get my laptop partitions setup to resemble the way it did back when it was new.  Hopefully then I get finally get the factory reset stuff to work.

A New Laptop for a New Year

The Great Hunt is on.  With my old faithful Acer Aspire on its last breaths, I felt that I needed to look for a new laptop that provided me with some performance and portability plus comes with a blank OS or Ubuntu pre-installed.   This is a tough order as most machines here come with Microsoft stuff tacked on.  I found a reasonably priced Lenovo G480 that comes with no OS and while I feel like I could roll the dice for this machine, I've read threads about its compatibility woes with Ubuntu, at least with 12.04.

All this has made me go through Ubuntu's rather useless site of certified hardware.  The website is rather useless when it comes to searching for performance equipment, so I had to do some Google magic on it.  My preliminary list of target hardware are:

i7 CPUs

• Lenovo V480
• Lenovo V580
• Lenovo Thinkpad W530
• Lenovo Thinkpad W510
• Lenovo Thinkpad T510

i5 CPU Laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E530

Ubuntu friendly just don't cut the mustard anymore for me.  I'm looking to zip and go so I'm hoping to see what the machine specs are.  Hopefully they are sold here without an OS too!