New laptop hard drive & Operating systems...

Yes the thread title is bit vague, to put it more precise terms:
My 500 GB (came from dell with system) laptop hard drive is dying a relatively slow but inevitable death. I am already planning on buying a 1 TB drive from a third party website to replace it. My main thoughts now are what to do once I get that. My options are straight forward enough.
0) reinstall windows 7 from the disk Dell provided. Painless enough, and easy to reinstall additional software as I see fit such as GIMP, irfanview, etc. etc.
1) Ghost the old drive to the new drive, not setup for that right now and not that interested in the first place. I can easily yank the old drive and read that by itself to make sure I have not missed any files on the transfer I have already done over the network.
2) Dualboot win7 and some flavour of linux
3) Ditch Windows on the laptop and upgrade the whole thing to straight linux. The "cons" of this are minimal. The only game I play on either system is Red Aler 2: Yuri's Revenge and I can handle losing that. Utilities such as the GIMP and Openoffice on the old/current drive are included with most *nix distros or very easy to install/update.

My feelings are leaning strongly toward the last choice, but that raises the age old question - what distro in the *nix world would be good to try on that system? My experience (especially recently) is limited but I have no problem getting into the CLI to play with things and would love to get some good hands-on time with that side of the operating system fence.
On that note, is there improved NTFS support in the *nix world now? I am thinking that setting up one partition in NTFS would be ideal for network sharing and the others would be one of those *nix specific types that slip my tired mind this very second.

 

I used a 3 or 4 year old Ubuntu USB boot drive to back-up a Windows 7 Professional PC w/ certain folders encrypted... everything copied just fine. So, I can vouch for good NTFS support from Linux as of 4 or so years ago. I still wouldn't recommend using any *nix distro to write to an NTFS partition; reading & decryption on the fly is fine.

And, honestly, you don't necessarily need to dual-boot, especially if you have more than 1 core on the processor... just run Windows in a bootable VM (separately formatted parition w/ Windows, that you can use the boot loader to select direct into, or launch in VM while you're in Linux). You can of course do this visa-versa, too...

I <3 The GIMP.

 

I scarcely remember posting this thread (and am glad it sounds coherent) in the first place as it was right before I crashed after a looong day, but I am leaning toward the 750 GB drive now just to save a few mere dollars.
I might go with the dualboot option just for the full support windows has for my cheap canon mutilfunction inkjet with the nice scanner.

 

I would get a solid state drive if you can live with a smaller drive.

I use Linux Mint, and I like it.

 

I was thinking of Ubuntu and that does really grab my interest. Buying a slightly longer USB cable to connect the canon multifunction to the desktop would work well enough, and I can live without the 10 year old westwood game I suppose. Tried playing it on the main system once and it does not want to play sound for some reason; did not care enough about it to try to fix that problem.

Solid State drives sound nice but those prices are a bit higher than I want to pay, especially when the whole system only cost $700 brand new three years ago. The 64 GB option starts at the same price for the 750 GB "normal" type.
--- merged: Jun 13, 2012 at 5:22 PM ---

This has a dual core 2.0 GHZ CPU if memory serves. More than adequate so far for what it has been used so far.
I am a huge fan of the GIMP but have defected so to speak to the Adobe Dark side for most of my work now. I am willing to pay the monthly fee to use Photoshop CS 6, and it has enough differences that make a world of difference to me and that much easier to use. I did upgrade to GIMP 2.8 as soon as the precompiled files for Windows were available though, and that will always be the main option on my laptop.

 

If you're comfortable with the command line consider giving archlinux a try, I've had it on my laptop for some time and it's basically the most unoffensive OS I've ever used once I got everything configured.

 

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Yeah.

I come from a *nix background. Then there's pragmatism & comments like this.

 

I started on DOS 3.3/4.0, used batch files made from scratch, even tried that joy of a editor Edlin - that upgrade to DOS editor was a nice one and you can copy the .exe for it from a DOS 5 system to a DOS 4 system.
Not so familiar or rusty at best with *nix protocol/commands but learning those better is one of the bigger reasons I would prefer a fast current *nix system to use. All of the programs I use on the laptop like GIMP, Audacity, and Openoffice.org are pre-installed or readily available in any modern distro out there.
On that note, I am finally going to order the drive today before this laptop turns into a decorative paperweight.
Is it a good sign when the capital "E" in both Enron and Dell is that similar?

 

This might be excessively basic so don't take it the wrong way: Pretty much any modern distro will have a couple Repos ranging from "Stable" to "Experimental" you can readily and easily install things from and usually also a "Community" repository that's composed of exactly what it sounds like. The experience can range from the very user friendly end with Debian and Ubuntu where it's literally browsing an App Market to Archlinux's default where you need to know the exact package name you want and then you get it from the command line. Even then though it's still pretty damn easy for me to just type "Pacman -S packagenamehere" as root and there's still a program out there that gives me a full handles-everything GUI with a search function for those times I'm feeling adventurous.

The major differences, aside from under the hood stuff, are going to be just how close to the cutting edge your software is and the breadth of availability.

 

Dual core 2 GHZ and 3 GB of ram should be able run anything decent out there. It runs win7 just fine, the only problems I am seeing now are being caused by the single piece of failing hardware, not the software.

 

That's freaking hilarious.

 

I've got worse than that afaik (~5ish year old HP pavilion dv6000t) and it could handle ubuntu with all the compositing eye candy turned on so yeah I think you're good for win7 or pretty much anything.

 

If you don't use anything that has to run exclusively on Windows, then Linux all the way. The only reason I'm not running Ubuntu right now is because I have Windows-exclusive programs and don't like using Wine. Ubuntu is definitely the most common option, though I believe it's relying on EXT4 instead of NTFS. Of course, NTFS is supported and has been since 9.10 (possibly even before that).

The last time I used Ubuntu was the 11.04 release, and I have to say, I loved the interface because they've started adding features that are similar to the ones in Windows. In particular, the ability to search for programs/applications is what I loved most (and rely on heavily with Win7 anyway). Plus Ubuntu gives you the whole Virtual Multi-Desktop ability, and that's a plus. Hope this helps.

 

Still working with Linux, I just switched from Linux Mint 13 to straight Ubuntu 12.04
I need to play with wireless networking on this setup, and get a better feel for it. Should be a good experience, setting up a small FAT32 partition that the windows vista system can easily access is on my list as well.