Boyle's Observation
A welfare state is one that assumes responsibility for the health, happiness, and general well being of all its citizens except the taxpayers.
The graduands dinner of 2004 is being hosted tomorrow. (Of course, yours truly is going to attend it - who would want to give up the chance of dinner, which, incidentally is not free, because we paid quite a sizeable amount when we signed up a declaration for becoming a member of
IITM alumni organisation.). This dinner, comprising of speeches for an hour (will I be able to stay awake???) followed by the dinner, will probably come about as the first step in the process of leaving the portals of IIT, for all the graduands. (The last step, I think is the Convocation, wherein we get our certificates...) I am sure a lot of memories of my four year course in IIT will be triggered, a lot of new things learnt, going through a new facet of life, enjoying aspects which otherwise I would have never felt, reading the brains of the cream of the student and faculty circles. I could go on and on. But I reserve it for another day, another post. But I hope to have a good time.
The day after tomorrow, namely Saturday, I am planning to format my entire Hard Disk, and reinstall Windows. Now you would think, who in their right minds would want to do such a time wasting and risky process. I agree. But there are certain aspects which you have to consider first.
My comp is now 3 years old. Have been running with the same OS for more than 2 1/2 years, without it having not crashed at all, (I am thankful to
Microsoft for that.) and a parallel stripped down
Mandrake 8.2 (Stripped down, because I didnt have many packages on hand that I could install, so it was just a white elephant on my Hard Disk). I had never formatted my entire HD even once before. My hard disk had become quite bloated, struggling for space and RAM and processing power, so this process was inevitable. I didnt dare to do it before, as I had downloaded more that 100 MB of stuff, got lots of softwares and songs from friends and net, and I didnt want to lose it. Now that I have a writer, I am going ahead with this plan in full steam. My plan of action :- (It is going to be slightly techie, but definitely not geeky)
- Obtain the necessary CD's first - The OS (Windows XP) , Red Hat Linux 7.3 (I chose such a low version because I didnt want to allocate more than 2 GB for it), some CD-RW's for the backups, essential softares - Office, Visual Studio and other miscellaneous stuff.
- Uninstall all softwares on my system (except Nero - for burning backups), and write the skeletons (whatever files are remaining after uninstallation) on the CD - RWs. Write any downloaded stuff, drivers, misc. and songs also (Luckily, I had already done that)
- Using Windows Disk Management (2000 and XP), free the other partitions.
- Boot with the bootable Windows CD (If you wanna have the Win - Lin Combination, always install the Windows OS first), remove the primary partition (which originally contained the Windows OS), create a new partition of the required size and go ahead with the Windows installation.
- After successful installation, install the drivers for any new hardware, and updated drivers for your motherboard, graphics cards, sounds cards, modems etc. Also install DirectX 9.0b (the latest version), any Windows patches and updates (believe me, there are a LOT OF THEM).
- Now you can create the secondary/extended partitions, using disk management mentioned above. If you plan to install Linux also, leave some space unallocated (my case, its 2 GB; nowadays with 80GB hard disks, u can afford to leave 10 GB for it).
- Boot with the Linux CD - no 1. (If you are a newbie to Linux, I suggest you start with the Mandrake flavor of Linux - it is much more user friendly and easier to install. If you know your way around Linux, you can go for Red Hat, which is tad more difficult, and confusing. Be warned) Just follow the instructions and install. Note that Linux (especially the later versions) gobble up space and system resources like anything. Dont for it, unless you have a P4 2.x or a Athlon 2x00 processors, running atleast on 256 MB or memory. Also, dont install all the applications mentioned there - You wouldnt be needing even half of those. (I plan to use it mainly for those cute games in Linux). Wait until it finishes.
There you go, now you have the
Win-Lin Combination. Enjoy.
Note that installing Linux will create a Linux Boot Loader for choosing the OS (it is usually installed on the
Master Boot Record. So if you want to remove the Linux OS, all you need to do is the command
fdisk /mbr for 98, and
fixmbr in the
recovery console for XP and 2000. This process will rewrite the boot record so that the Linux Boot Loader is overwritten and it now points to Windows. (This recovery console has to be installed separately. See windows help for that). Then You can delete the Linux Partitions using the ever faithful Disk Management.
