Actually, thanks to my grandmother's generosity, I now have a 60 GB hard drive. However, they came to me partitioned at 20/40, so I'm going to hold out on Kubuntu until I get that un-partitioned. (I think I have a copy of PM around here somewhere, but I don't know if it works with XP...)
Oh, and I thought I'd tell you that I am NOT reinstalling Norton on my PC; it's one of the reasons I formatted. Every $@#!ing time I start windows, I got three popups that read
"Norton Internet Security does not support the Repair feature, please uninstall and reinstall".
If I tried to open a Word document, I'd get those three, PLUS a popup from Word saying "the action cannot be performed because a popup box is open. Please close them to continue". Then there was the weird thing where if I clicked on a program in my list of Commonly Used Programs in the Start Menu, the menu would be frozen on the screen for 3 seconds before executing. I think that was a virus. Then there was all the unneeded programs, the mucked-up registry... it was a mess.
Yes... it was that time. However, an odd thing happened: I went into Recovery Console to format (after making a 2.04 GB zipped copy of documents and setup files to my second disk drive) C:, and it asked for the Administrator password! I just hit Enter, and it said "invalid". I guessed until it said I had exceeded my attempts and had to reboot.
I used an old Windows XP trick to access my account in a special mode that allows me to modify the Admin account (the regulars here know what I mean, but I'm leaving this un-said so that kids can't get past their parent's password-protection
), and I set the Admin password to something I can easily remember. But that was still weird. :-/
Well, I've now reinstalled the basics I need to run my computer. It's back to installing things as I go along and need/want them.
