All this started because I bought a hard drive with 100 more gigs than the original that came with my laptop back in spring 2005. With Windows installed and the router problem solved, I decided to attempt a dual-boot environment. I should be more specific in that I decided to try a dual-boot setup before I reinstalled Windows, and in that mindset, partitioned 20 gigs for Windows and left 140 undone. Not many users have that liberty, but by doing so, setting up the dual-boot with the Ubuntu LiveCD was absolutely painless. I left alone the 20gb Windows partition and installed Ubuntu on the 140g as if it were a harddisk in entirety and restarted. GRUB instantly gave me the option of booting Windows upon restart, which is what I am writing out of now. I didn’t have to specify anywhere that I wanted a dual-boot environment; GRUB is adept.

VirtualBox is excellent for running windoze within Linux, if you don’t want to dual boot, but The Master Genealogist, Still Life 2 (and Post Mortem and Still Life), and Digimarc are windoze only, so I decided to go for dual boot instead. Hopefully I am finished reinstalling OSs; it’s rather painful. “Painless” refers only to the dual-boot attempt, as I thought it would entail re-installing another three times! (Ubuntu is too easy to reinstall and I find myself fiddling with it a lot, and then reinstalling, because I have no idea what I did.)

(This post references another post of mine: Taking Off With Linux.)