Thanks for this tip. Both the qparted tip and the 32label worked for me. The only thing I would add is that the user is going to need to change the permissions on the external hard drive to their user account if they are using Hardy, because Hardy set the ownership of my Iomega external hard drive as root. Some end users might not think of that. The symptom that I was experiencing was trouble writing to the external hard drive.

Thanks again, Matt!

Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point

Thank you much for your help in turning off the STANDBY feature on the Seagate Free Agent Pro. I have a series of cron tasks that are supposed to routinely back up my data to a Seagate, and the spin down was a horrible nuisance.

On the other hand, I’m still pretty ignorant when it comes to hardware. Will disabling the IDLE and STANDBY options shorten the drive’s life significantly?

--Brian

A mate of mine had a look at it and said to install Linux on it as it didn’t need to resources that windows required, now I have another computer back thanks to the greatest of Ubuntu, I would recommend it to anyone for normal internet use, I now use Mac but it is a great little back up and as others have said there are plenty of great open source programs for Ubuntu.

And version 7.10 skin looks a little like Mac! A cheap way around having something that looks like Mac without the greatness of Mac!

I have now starting converting windows users that have bought brand new computers with Vista to Ubuntu.

What I would be interested in is making basic seo available to the newcommers in this age of spam wouldn’t it do well to do some good to help people that are new with new ideas or do you guys just wanna promote spammy crap that pays you the money?

So , I want say, Ubuntu rlz win sux
/sry for my english.. I just start learning this language /

Thank you very much for the encouragement Tim and all the info. I will definitely try it once I have a new PC. As they say, don’t put all eggs in one basket!

I’ve use Fedora Linux for as long as it has been around, and Red-hat Linux before that, but Ubuntu won me over recently as it’s so simple to use.

As with all Linux distributions there can be some problems with hardware (if the manufacturer doesn’t stick to standards and refuses to tell open source developers how to create drivers), but most things work without a hitch these days.

Rob, you said you use:
Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Dreamweaver, MSN, Yahoo and Google Chat, itunes, and Real Media, and Firefox and Thunderbird.

Ubuntu has:
Word -> open office
Excel -> open office
Powerpoint -> open office
Dreamweaver -> ? (I use bluefish, but I think you can run dreamweaver with WINE)
MSN -> Pidgin Internet Messenger (connects to msn)
itunes -> Rhythmbox (almost identical, but without the shopping)

and it has firefox and thunderbird (although I recommend Evolution over thunderbird).

Don’t know about real media, you can play real media, but I don’t know how to encode it.

For any of these things Linux is IMO easier to use than Vista or OSX, and it can be better looking, but for more technical things you need to start editing text file configuration settings. If you’re a standard computer user I would recommend Ubuntu.

There is also great support for ubuntu: see ubuntuforums.org