It only took an afternoon, and most of the evening, but I now am the proud owner of a dual boot desktop Pentium 4 computer!

I’ve mentioned my HP 864n a few times on the blog, and this past week I did some major hardware upgrades to it, in the process of bringing it back to life. Windows XP died last August, going into a horrible reboot loop, both in regular and safe mode. I used Knoppix Live linux CD to verify the drive was still good, but had no luck in trying several different methods to fix the boot issue.

Fortunately the next day after the system crashed, I won a nifty little door prize here at Central Wyoming College…a brand new Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop…and I’ve been using it since then.

I picked up a new 200 gig hard drive last week, with intentions of using it as an external USB 2.o storage drive, but then thought how I could use it for something else…while improving on things.

So…installed the 200 gig in the 864n, installed the full recover CD set of 9 cds (full recovery of WinXP MCE, as it came out of the box), and a few other tools. Also installed a new Sony DVD-+RW dual layer burner, and another half a gig of RAM at the same time.

System has been running VERY fast all week. A friend from DC surprised me with the original boxed set of SUSE Linux 10.0 this week, and knowing that it was in the mail, I toyed with the idea of DUAL BOOT!

Going from the included manual, it took only 5 hours (mostly software install time, plus downloads of 160 megs of updates automatically by the install procss). A few reboots, and it’s working…Suse linux 10.0 and WinXP MCE on the boot menu…

All hardware works…including the printer and tv card…network system is all hunky dory…and web access is as fast as I want it to be…1000kb download speeds from my wireless internet access via Wyoming.com.

I’ll keep you updated as I begin to play with Suse…and start looking at some linux multimedia tools to learn about.