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The portable computer is another convert. When I turned it on last Friday evening after work, hoping to do some writing, I discovered that the latest round of Windows updates had installed the Windows Genuine Advantage function and was now telling me that the operating system on this machine of mine was not genuine. ‘You may be the victim of counter-fitting fraud,’ the software told me, kindly inviting me to purchase a legitimate licence. This is a second-hand computer – upon which the software was already installed – which is not even worth what I would have to pay for a brand-new operating system. And so I decided that now was the time to migrate a second machine to Ubuntu Linux.

I had a quick play with OpenOffice on my wife’s computer to make sure I could live with it as a MS Office substitute. When I first used it some years back I didn’t like it at all, but it now seems much improved and I decided this was the way to go. So I set about creating multiple back-ups of all my work in progress – just in case. That was the easy part. This computer doesn’t have a CD-ROM or floppy-disk drive, so booting up Ubuntu was going to be difficult. I’m not very technical when it comes to how computers work, so getting a grasp of partitions and things like that seemed to be beyond me.

I decided to take it to a local computer shop on Saturday to ask if I could borrow an external CD-ROM drive for half an hour or so – just enough time to boot up and get on my way. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way apparently – you can’t boot from a USB CD-ROM drive because it depends upon Windows to operate. They suggested I buy myself a PCMCIA drive off ebay, but when I found one the seller told me – very honestly I thought – that it wouldn’t work as I intended either. It looked like I was in a pickle, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

On my return home, after doing some work in the garden, I decided to research my options a little bit more, eventually coming across guidance on doing a netboot from Windows. Once I found the right cable, I connected the computer directly to the modem, downloaded a clever little installer called ‘Instlux‘ from www.sourceforge.net and set about running it. Guess what… it didn’t work. I could easily have given up, but the Microsoft price tag was weighing upon me heavily, so I pushed on. After five attempts, I thought, ‘What the heck?’ and decided to give the manual process a go… which didn’t work either.

But it did give me a clue as to what was wrong. Next to the boot command for Windows XP in the boot.ini file there were two more words – one that seemed to be code for ‘start Windows immediately’ and the other for ‘do not provide choice of operating system’. I cautiously deleted these two commands (I know you’re not meant to do this when you don’t know what you’re doing, but…), and ran the installer one more time.

Finally, it worked. Upon restarting the system, I was presented with two options – start Windows XP or run the Ubuntu installer. I chose the latter and watched as the installation began. Except for the absence of a pretty graphical interface, this initial installation was very similar to the CD-ROM installation. After filling in a few fields, the installer did everything for me from configuring the hardware to downloading an hour’s-worth of files. The countdown prompted me to head for bed.

Awoken up by the intense downpour in the middle of the night, I noticed the glow from the screen in my study on my way to the bathroom. The screen was blue, with two small white rectangles at the left and right edge. There weren’t any instructions, so I hit the space key in an effort to awaken the computer. Immediately it closed down and then restarted, and there I had a brand-new operating system in full working order.

I am pleased with the result. All of my Word documents are back in the file manager and open again in OpenOffice without difficulty. The wireless internet is now working perfectly – as it never did under Windows XP. The computer is working just right, and it didn’t cost me a penny. My main desktop computer will go on running Windows because I need it for my graphics software, but I think I’ve seen the future for basic office applications and the internet. Thanks to Windows Genuine Advantage I now have a system more suited to my needs.