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the rough road to 64 bits
Friday, June 1 2012
Today my struggles with "upgrading" Woodchuck (my main computer) continued. Today I had to abandon Debian Linux as a contender for my main OS when it proved incapable of driving multiple monitors. It's possible I could have gotten it to work, but just the process of installing proprietary Nvidia drivers is so infuriatingly complex that I had to make a decision that would leave me with a number of hours for other things this weekend. So I decided to "upgrade" to Windows 7 64. Mind you, Windows 7 is not my idea of a perfect OS. I dislike many of the default settings (basically, anything that doesn't look and behave like Windows 2000), but I'm used to tweaking those. (After all, that is what you must do to make Windows XP look like something other than a cartoon OS designed for breastfeeding eight year olds.)
Still, even the Windows 7 installation didn't go off without a hitch. The installer DVD comes with only the most rudimentary of disk partitioning tools, and (in my case at least) I found it impossible to resize or successfully add partitions using the installer.
But eventually I got Windows 7 installed, and nearly everything was working except for my Canon LiDE 30 scanner (which appeared to be a lost cause). I even managed to get my fifth monitor working, which connects through a suspiciously-generic USB-to-DVI adapter.
But then disaster hit. I booted up into Windows XP to move some stuff over to Windows 7 from that end. When I gave XP the task of formatting a 760 gigabyte partition on the new hard drive, it somehow scrambled the partition table completely, junking all the careful work I'd just done of coercing Windows 7 to be a useful operating system dedicated to something other than selling me crap and distracting me with unnecessary colors and movement. I'd already known that Windows XP isn't really capable of working with 3TB hard drives (otherwise I might have installed Windows XP 64), but I'd thought it could handle small partitions on such a drive. Evidently I was wrong. Again, those are many hours from my life that I will not be getting back.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
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