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(A little bedtime story)
After having used my own computer with Windows for a year or more, I had suffered the usual lock-ups and crashes that we've all come to expect from uncle Bill's wonderful operating system, along with a very frustrating a system crash which needed Windows to be re-installed. Fortunately I had my data back-ups up to date so nothing was lost on that occasion - it was just a waste of time.
The final straw came when, while attemting to do one of my regular backups, the system crashed. Nothing would get Windows started again. Using the system start up floppy Windows would not even start in 'safe mode' - there was some major corruption. The situation seemed hopeless, and I was hot under the collar as I feared that my recent documents including dozens of recent photographs could be lost.
I could see that the files were there in DOS, but Icould not get Windows to start.
I remembered I had a CD ROM of KNOPPIX, a Linux operating system that loads directly from a 'bootable' CD, rather than from the Hard Drive.
I had never tried Knoppix before, but I put it in the PC's ROM drive and set the PC to boot from the CD ROM. Knoppix loads the complete operating system into the RAM (Random Access Memory), and it runs from there.
It takes a little while to load since a CD Drive runs much slower than a hard drive, but once loaded I had a fully functional Linux operating system. With this installed I could then have a look at the hard drive contents and I could see that all my documents were intact. Thankfully I was able to safely recover the recent ones that I had feared were lost by burning them onto a CD-R. This saved the bother of transplanting the hard drive into another PC to read and recover the files.
Once I had recovered my files, I decided that I had had enough of these problems and wiped Windows from my machine and loaded a GNU/Linux operating system - the Mandrake distribution. I transferred all my backed-up and recovered documents and was away again - but this time window-less.
I didn't hang around to find out what happend to Windows, perhaps it had just corrupted itself, or maybe it was a virus, we all know that Windows is extremely prone to viruses, worms and trojans etc. but I had always used a virus-scanner, practiced safe surfing and never opened any unsolicited e-mail (and kept my fingers crossed too). I did scan all my backed-up and recovered documents for viruses, but they were uninfected, and I also searched through for unknown programs (viruses) that should not be present on the hard drive, but could find nothing immediately obvious that would have caused so many problems.
So now Mandrake Linux is installed I am computing again. Linux is not always as easy to administer as Windows, but I am hoping for the sucurity and stability promised by a GNU/Linux system. Certainly I had not experienced a system crash after six months of using the system, but only time will tell!
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