I am in Love with my PC… Again!

I dont know how many times i was in love before. Being in and out of love has been a bumpy ride till now. Among the vast occurances of the love bug in my mind, I remember a few very distinctly. First, it was with a girl. Again, with another one. Then with my PC. Then with my Wrist Watch. Then with my Bike. Lately, with my mobile. Now, again with my PC! 😉 I have valid reasons to support my affair this time too. 😛

The first reason : There was a time when I was cursing my time working with a 256MB RAM and a pretty decent Processor-Motherboard Combo. All was well till the “New PC” proved itself to be not so good as new after all. As the Comp became older (of course as time passed), multiple apps didn’t like my 256MB RAM and I was involved in a heated argument with my PC over it. Very recently, the silver lining appeared in the form of a 1GB RAM, presented as a Dushera gift by my Dad! 🙂 My PC was very happy and was ready to serve me seamlessly again. You see, 4 times the power does have its advantages!

The second reason : My father arranged a business deal to purchase a second office PC to handle his extra load and work parallely. As a token of loyalty and appreciation, the computer vendor (from whom I’d purchased my PC and my father, his 1^st Office PC), agreed for the exchange of my SAMSUNG 80 GB IDE HDD with a new SEAGATE 160 GB IDE HDD, without any extra charge! Another reason to happy for! ‘Coz, I can have double the number of movies, torrents, songs, games, apps, etc., from now on.

The Third And the most lovable reason : I just got the much needed freedom from viruses, spyware, malware, adware, keyloggers, and everything that a person can dread to have in his PC. Me installing Avast Home edition on my WinXP Pro may appear to be the reason. But it isn’t. I’ve switched over to Ubuntu, almost completely! The time required for the switching over was less than 48 hrs! Now, except for playing my most favorite game “Prince of Persia – Warrior Within”, I never bother to boot up XP.

The third reason holds much more ground for my love affair to be a successful one. That is because, Ubuntu works like a charm even on a 256MB RAM + 80 GB HDD environment. So, working with Ubuntu is what that  makes all the difference. I have solid base to support my claims Readers! First, it is an open secret that working with the most successful OS from the Microsoft stable, XP, can piss you off at more times than Jerry did to Tom, if you are not just an average Joe, as ‘Visio’ a.k.a ‘T’ a.k.a ‘Jit’ puts it. A funny, but an enlightening post in this regard should tell you why!

Switching over to Ubuntu, or Linux in broader terms, has its advantages which are never percived to exist in the computing(with MS-Windows) world. I can share atleast 10 dozen things with you from the experience gained in a meagre 48 hrs. But, I won’t bug you with that stuff. Read it at places where it has been discribed well. For instance, Visio has said it in an amazing way here. Needless to say, all those points go into making a strong ground for my love story!

Now, coming to the love story part again. I dreaded using graphic/theme editors like Style XP because of my RAM. I felt it to be something like earning 20k per month, but desiring to marry Mallika Sherawet. By the time i got a 1 GB RAM, i wasn’t very interested in graphics, just like a 60 yr old man with a 55 yr old wife 😛 . But Ubuntu turned the tables. Here is how!

Showing off! My PC, My Pride!

That was my over expressive self showing up on my desktop! Now, its time to present the actual desktop.

The plain looking, all powerful desktop. That pic is mine and is used as an icon for one of my HDD partition.

I just couldn’t resist keeping quite about the mind-blowing graphics possible. So, I set the screen on a Fire Pattern like this…

No! It was not done using some spell from Harry Potter. But, with the small dirty thing under your Palm - The Mouse!

If you thought that switching between applications or windows was a boring thing to do, the WinKey+Tab Combo should cheer you up with this…

One possible WinKey+Tab anime!

Actually speaking, Multiple windows is a thing of past. How about having a peek into Multiple Workspaces?

Moving Applications from one work-place to another. A window appears to move as if you were tickling it, and it were drifting away!

The workspaces (4 in my case) are arranged in the form of a cube so that the whole cube rotates while switching workspaces. The images at bottom and top of the cube are the same. Isn't it matching-matching with the wallpaper! 😛

This was exhilerating! I couldn't imagine my PC was capable of all this! The active workspace having 3D sandwiched windows.

I am sorry to have bugged those users who are already using all this, and possibly more. For those of you who are new to this, I’d like to say that, I was new to this 3 days ago, too. So, if you make some very important comparisons with OSes claiming to offer a good XPerience 😉 , I think you’re well equipped to take a good decision!

Very Important : Images are supposed to be Copyrighted to ME. But, in the spirit of FOSS (Free Open Source Software), I would be happy to see my screenshots somewhere else too. 🙂 However, My wallpaper is copyrighted to one Michael Bonnel and I would like to thank him for a great abstract piece!

This isn’t the end of it! It was just a humble beginning. Use an appropriate search phrase and you can see for yourself some amazing screenshots, before which mine may appear to be a dud!

PS : If mine was a love story, my closest pal, Anniyan’s was a battle well fought. Care to take a look?