Since you're on a Computer, Read about Operating Systems!

Once again, it takes me a while to post things on the blog. I guess part of it is I'm still trying to get things back to something resembling normal. Although I highly doubt what I used to know as normal will ever be my normal again. Of course, I could try and talk about politics again, but once I realized that popularity contest known as the Presidential election is now officially underway with Senator Cruz's announcement, my brain did an automatic 'check out'. So, I'll just talk about something I've been doing that's slightly less controversial. Computers and operating systems.

I have a number of older computers in the house. At least I judge them as older when you consider the operating systems found on them. As of January, I had one operating on Windows XP, three operating on Windows Vista, one operating on Windows 7, and one on Windows 8.1.

I'm the (un)official tech support for the house. When one family member has an issue with their machine, I get either a frantic phone call at work, or a 'dad, can you look at...?' when I'm at home. I'm not a 'techno geek' by any stretch of the imagination, but I would put my knowledge level at the 'knows just enough to be dangerous'.

My method of trouble shooting is encapsulated in the phrase (and I can't claim this as my original) 'Google is my friend.' I put the operating system and the error into the search, and more often than not I can find a fairly simple method of fixing it. It may involve going to the command prompt and putting some commands in, but it's not anything I would consider 'graduate' level.

I ran into a problem with one of the children's Vista machines. The recommended resolutions for the error listed were either playing with registry keys (moving into graduate level) or reinstalling the operating system. I just wasn't comfortable with the registry key instructions. Since I didn't have a spare system disk laying around, and I wasn't about to shell out the money required for said system disk, I stared looking into alternatives.

I would dare to say people are only familiar with the Windows family of operating systems for computers. Microsoft has made it so their systems are well known and fairly easy to use. They're not perfect (not by a long shot), and they do have a number of issues. One of the reasons Google works so well for finding out how to fix problems with Windows is because of the number of issues Windows has. I had been aware of 'the other side' of computer operating systems (known as Linux), and more specifically the distribution (OS) known as Ubuntu. I started looking at how easy Ubuntu or other Linux type systems would be to use and install. After some looking and asking around, I finally chose the Linux Mint system. You can read more about it here.

I have to admit, the system itself was easy to install, the hardware worked without any issues, and the installation even recognized a Windows operating system was on the computer and asked whether I wanted to install Mint alongside (dual boot – where you choose the operating system you go into every time you boot up the computer), or install over the Windows OS. For this situation, I needed to install over the Windows OS.

The next task I undertook was to update the Windows XP computer. Although I enjoyed XP, and thought it was one of the better Windows OS's, it is no longer supported by Microsoft. And considering the machine running it wouldn't have handled an upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 (I doubt it could even handle an upgrade to Vista) I decided to switch that one to Mint. It handled the switch OK, with one issue. The wireless network card was one of those that had proprietary drivers. Now what? I went back to Google. There was also a community I could look into as well. I found the necessary commands, and got that to work.

For my final trick, I decided to put two machines into a dual-boot configuration. One Vista machine (the one I work on) and the Windows 7 machine (which is the wife's. I don't think the eldest would let me touch the Windows 8 machine). I had to do some looking into some higher level tasks to prepare them (unallocating some hard drive space in particular), but there were no problems. Both computers boot up and run Linux faster than Windows, but Windows still runs with no new issues from having Linux installed.

To me, the operating system is simply a tool for people to use. If you're using your computer to access the internet, do email, and maybe some simple writing and work tasks, then in my opinion Linux Mint (and most other Linux distributions) is a viable alternative to Windows operating systems. It doesn't require a lot of RAM or hard drive space to run the OS itself, and perhaps most importantly, it's free for download and installation. If you have a lot of games, or do a lot of gaming, then it gets a bit more difficult but there are software packages that allow you to run Windows games. Not much else, but at least you can install your Windows games and play those. Not that this was a review, but if you ask me, having choices is always better.