NaNo Week 3: The week from...

This has been a horrible week. It started off great, when I finished my first novel, but quickly went downhill.
My computer died. The hard-drive and motherboard both quit. I had a backup of my novel, so it's fine. I did lose a lot of other stuff though. Pictures are the most painful loss. The hard-drive is gone, and the pictures aren't worth the crazy fees a professional would charge to attempt retrieving them. I've tried quite a few suggestions that I found online, and nothing has worked yet. My final option is an external case for the drive, when I have the money in a few months.

Something to be thankful about, is the many spare computers I have laying around. The computer that quit was one of four that I got for $10 each. I'm not running current generation hardware, but it doesn't sting quite as much when a $10 computer dies.

I've grown a bit more paranoid, and I have three hard drives in my current system. (All of them 30Gb) As long as I remember to make a copy of everything I'm hoping that things will be okay. I also noticed that as of October, Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP. This has been my operating system of choice until now.

That, along with other factors, led me to try one of the free Linux operating systems. I'm running it with Win XP, meaning that I have the option to load either Windows or Linux on startup. I'm pleased with the results so far. I chose Ubuntu 10.10, and it runs great. It can handle the same number of applications as Win Xp could, without any slowdown. There are a few areas that feel a bit slower, but not many. There are other distributions that are focused on lower system requirements, and I might give some of them a try, if it becomes a problem.

I'm completely new to Linux, and fairly inexperienced with most programming languages, so it's going to be an interesting journey. The desktop on Ubuntu is easy to use for all the standard uses, but there is a lot of potential if I decide to try to learn something new.

And... Bringing it back to NaNo again, the free software I use to write, Open Office, is available on both Windows and Linux, making the switch even easier.
That's the end of my moaning and complaining. It's been a tough week, and I've let my writing slip. Hopefully my next post will be positive, with some new achievements to report.