Please don't yell at me.

[Richard Birkbeck]

Last week I installed Ubuntu 5.10 on the second hard drive of my spare
PC. It installed perfectly and even set up dual booting; with WinXP on
the primary. I've been playing around with it and have to say that
Ubutnu is the slickest of all the Linux distros I've tried.

But, I would like to un install it and return the second hard drive to
Windows. Could anyone please tell me how to go about this?

Your first question probably is, "Why would anyone want to go back to
Windows?" Without going into a big song and dance the main reasons are
that Open Office Ver 2 still doesn't measure up to MS Office for my
purposes and The Gimp is no substitute for Paint Shop Pro.

As an Oldie, my learning curve has pretty well flattened out and I
need to stick to what's familiar. Can anyone please help?

Harassed in Hastings

[RaidenSix]

2 things:

1. Use your XP cd to boot into recovery mode and type : fixmbr
This will remove the grub bootloader and allow u to boot into just XP.

2. Once #1 is done, you need to reformat the 2nd drive into NTFS and
make it useable by XP.

"Richard Birkbeck" <finty01@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:f7ug72dp51l5jjl0ffvkr529iqbsmnlh0b@4ax.com...

>
> Last week I installed Ubuntu 5.10 on the second hard drive of my spare
> PC. It installed perfectly and even set up dual booting; with WinXP on
> the primary. I've been playing around with it and have to say that
> Ubutnu is the slickest of all the Linux distros I've tried.
>
> But, I would like to un install it and return the second hard drive to
> Windows. Could anyone please tell me how to go about this?
>
> Your first question probably is, "Why would anyone want to go back to
> Windows?" Without going into a big song and dance the main reasons are
> that Open Office Ver 2 still doesn't measure up to MS Office for my
> purposes and The Gimp is no substitute for Paint Shop Pro.
>
> As an Oldie, my learning curve has pretty well flattened out and I
> need to stick to what's familiar. Can anyone please help?
>
> Harassed in Hastings
>
>

[Richard Birkbeck]

Dear wannes and Raiden Six,

Thank you very much for your instant help. I will get on it right
away. And especially thank you for not yelling at me.

Cheers,
Rich

[Gordon]

"Richard Birkbeck" <finty01@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:f7ug72dp51l5jjl0ffvkr529iqbsmnlh0b@4ax.com...

>

> Your first question probably is, "Why would anyone want to go back to
> Windows?" Without going into a big song and dance the main reasons are
> that Open Office Ver 2 still doesn't measure up to MS Office for my
> purposes

just out of interest, can I ask what functions you have in MS Office that
don't appear in OO 2.02 ? As an advanced Excel user I find that OO does
EVERYTHING I ever did with Excel.

[Simon Jones]

On Mon, 29 May 2006 07:44:05 +0100, Gordon mumbled:

> "Richard Birkbeck" <finty01@btinternet.com> wrote in message
> news:f7ug72dp51l5jjl0ffvkr529iqbsmnlh0b@4ax.com...

>>

>

>> Your first question probably is, "Why would anyone want to go back to
>> Windows?" Without going into a big song and dance the main reasons are
>> that Open Office Ver 2 still doesn't measure up to MS Office for my
>> purposes

>
>
> just out of interest, can I ask what functions you have in MS Office that
> don't appear in OO 2.02 ? As an advanced Excel user I find that OO does
> EVERYTHING I ever did with Excel.
>
>

There's lots of formatting gets lost, or altered. It may well be that OO is
doing it correctly and we expect the broken version.

OO2 is much closer and 99% of the time is fine, but it's not interchangeable
for MS office... yet! ;-)
--
Simon.
================================================== ===================
"Back up my hard disk ? I can't find the reverse switch !"
================================================== ===================

[Gordon]

"Simon Jones" <tux@iinet.net.au> wrote in message
news:447a9f26$0$7837$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au...

>
> There's lots of formatting gets lost, or altered.

but that's an interoperability function, not an internal function of OO


It may well be that OO is

> doing it correctly and we expect the broken version.
>
> OO2 is much closer and 99% of the time is fine, but it's not
> interchangeable
> for MS office... yet! ;-)

Not true. If you change a whole organisation to OO so that everyone is using
it, then OO IS ready for the enterprise. As Isaid, as an Advanced Excel user
(management accounting) I find that OO Calc does everything I used to do
with Excel. OK, the macros don't convert well, but that's again that's an
interoperability question, not a problem with the functionality of OO.

> --
> Simon.
> ================================================== ===================
> "Back up my hard disk ? I can't find the reverse switch !"
> ================================================== ===================

[Simon Jones]

On Mon, 29 May 2006 08:23:08 +0100, Gordon mumbled:

> "Simon Jones" <tux@iinet.net.au> wrote in message
> news:447a9f26$0$7837$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au...

>>
>> There's lots of formatting gets lost, or altered.

>
> but that's an interoperability function, not an internal function of OO
>
>
> It may well be that OO is

>> doing it correctly and we expect the broken version.
>>
>> OO2 is much closer and 99% of the time is fine, but it's not
>> interchangeable
>> for MS office... yet! ;-)

>
>
> Not true. If you change a whole organisation to OO so that everyone is using
> it, then OO IS ready for the enterprise. As Isaid, as an Advanced Excel user
> (management accounting) I find that OO Calc does everything I used to do
> with Excel. OK, the macros don't convert well, but that's again that's an
> interoperability question, not a problem with the functionality of OO.

That's fine if you never deal with external documents. Being a small
business means about half are from external sources.

--
Simon.
================================================== ===================
"Back up my hard disk ? I can't find the reverse switch !"
================================================== ===================

[Al]

In article
<447ada5a$0$7876$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au>,
Simon Jones <tux@iinet.net.au> wrote:

> On Mon, 29 May 2006 08:23:08 +0100, Gordon mumbled:

> > "Simon Jones" <tux@iinet.net.au> wrote in message
> > news:447a9f26$0$7837$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au...

> >>
> >> There's lots of formatting gets lost, or altered.

> >
> > but that's an interoperability function, not an internal function of OO
> >
> >
> > It may well be that OO is

> >> doing it correctly and we expect the broken version.
> >>
> >> OO2 is much closer and 99% of the time is fine, but it's not
> >> interchangeable
> >> for MS office... yet! ;-)

> >
> >
> > Not true. If you change a whole organisation to OO so that everyone is
> > using
> > it, then OO IS ready for the enterprise. As Isaid, as an Advanced Excel
> > user
> > (management accounting) I find that OO Calc does everything I used to do
> > with Excel. OK, the macros don't convert well, but that's again that's an
> > interoperability question, not a problem with the functionality of OO.

> That's fine if you never deal with external documents. Being a small
> business means about half are from external sources.

The trivial amount of lost formatting has not bothered me in the least.

Al

[Richard Birkbeck]

On Mon, 29 May 2006 07:44:05 +0100, "Gordon"
<gordon@lgbpcomputing.co.uk.invalid> wrote:

>just out of interest, can I ask what functions you have in MS Office that
>don't appear in OO 2.02 ? As an advanced Excel user I find that OO does
>EVERYTHING I ever did with Excel.
>

Gordon,

The main application in MS Office I use is Winword. I am converting
some ancient files that I did back in an old DOS program called
Secretary Bird. We are talking some ten years of research here which
amounts to a lot of text. A lot of them are in all capital letters
because in those days I was a lazy typist and it was easier to do it
that way. So now, after converting the text to a more modern program,
I'm having to convert them to properly constructed sentences. In the
Change Case function, Winword has a Sentence Case choice which will
capitalize the first letter after a period. I sat up a macro so I can
convert whole paragraphs with a key press combination. This has saved
me a lot of screwing around. So that is primarily the reason I didn't
like using Open Office. On my computer Open Office seems to be quite a
bit slower, too.

My main reason for backing out of Linux, though, was that I just
couldn't get it to recognize my bloody Winmodems. I downloaded
instructions on how to go about setting that up, but, as I said
before, my learning curve is pretty well flattened out and learning
new things just doesn't bring as much joy as it used to.

Thanks for your interest.

Rich

[Gordon]

"Richard Birkbeck" <finty01@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:miul72dlcvjj5iqfhe0gfq7r8clmi0bd3h@4ax.com...

>
> My main reason for backing out of Linux, though, was that I just
> couldn't get it to recognize my bloody Winmodems.

Ah. the final killer. I sympathise with that! Can you not get broadband?

[Conor]

In article <4e0ep5F1c4fkaU1@individual.net>, Gordon says...

> "Richard Birkbeck" <finty01@btinternet.com> wrote in message
> news:miul72dlcvjj5iqfhe0gfq7r8clmi0bd3h@4ax.com...

> >
> > My main reason for backing out of Linux, though, was that I just
> > couldn't get it to recognize my bloody Winmodems.

>
> Ah. the final killer. I sympathise with that! Can you not get broadband?
>

Or just buy a winmodem with a HCF or Lucent chipset.


--
Conor,
Grumpy Old Man.
Same shit, different day.