After the first time it’s all second nature to fiddle around with OSes and such, so I decided to put Windows 7 on my Aspire One as well. On top of that, parts arrived for my old desktop!

The old desktop is not so old anymore as it now has gotten a 2GB RAM stick and a “new” (to me) graphics card – a GeForce 6800 GO. UNfortunately, no-one had told me hard drives come without necessary cables, so the new 250GB hard drive is currently not in use until I get some S-ATA cables. Doesn’t really matter since most my files are on the laptop and two external drives. With the new upgrades, I can even run HD video fullscreen from YouTube (something I can’t do on any on my other machines) and the OS only uses 21.5% of the 2GB of RAM to stay “alive” (with desktop gadgets, Synergy, gtalk and Pidgin running as well). All in all it’s turning out to be a great PC to have just from the extra parts and new OS.

The Aspire One installation didn’t go as smooth. I non-destructively partitioned it as I did my desktop and put Windows 7 on there fine, but when I went to Gparted to resise the partition the trouble started. Since there was files on there now (Windows 7) it would take 3 hours to move the files internally on the HDD to expand the partition. Fine, I could wait. After 2 hours, the screen got messed up and I had to manually shut the computer off. When I booted back up, Windows 7 wouldn’t start (but XP would, of course, this is why I wanted to keep my old OS). Gparted hadn’t actually fucked up much, just the boot loader, so 2 minutes later I’d booted into the Windows 7 install menu and selected repair, where it said there was a problem with the startup and fixed it. I went back to Gparted and made a partition called “files” with the space I’d gotten from shrinking the other partition (the space I wanted to expand the Windows 7 partition with) and it’s now all fine. I have a ~40GB partition with Windows XP and apps, a 30Gb partition with Windows 7 and apps, and a 40GB partition with files.

I also made a spare Windows 7 install USB stick, and tried to make a new Ubuntu 9.04 bootable live USB stick. The latter got screwed by something I can’t figure out as the screen goes screwy after it loads the desktop. Won’t spend more time on it since the 8.04 stick I have works just fine.