It is now eight hard drive crashes since January 2005 on three different computers. Yes, there is something bigger going on and we’re still trying to figure it out. We have massive surge protectors and backup UPS units on these, and no sign of viruses or any software glitches. It’s just our year for mega computer crisises. Hate it!

Shhhh, for Xmas, I just bought my husband a mongo new HP laptop. This is his first ever brand new computer purchased with him in mind. He ususally gets my left overs. He’s going to be a seriously happy boy.

With a clean machine, though (where you’ve just reinstalled and are sure there’s nothing *weird* on it — no adware, spyware, viruses), my network guy tells me a better solution is to have a second internal hard drive and copy the first to it. If anything happens to the first, you’ve got a clean hard drive ready to go. I’m thinking a combination of the two would be ideal.

The real question, though, is: what could be going on that you’ve had six HD crashes in 12 months?

Ubuntu also has a live CD version out. It isn’t as full-featured as the installable version, or as compatible as Knoppix, but has a more polished UI. I don’t remember if it auto-mounts your windows partitions, though.

Both distros, as far as I know, mount the windows partition as read-only. Linux support of NTFS (Window XP’s filesystem) is sorely lacking.