I turned on my XBOX 360 tonight and was met with a blank screen and 3 red lights around the power button. I found a web page that describes what to do to fix it. I was a little skeptical about picking up the console and smacking it though. I noticed a comment on that page talking about hard drive "stiction" and remembered my days as a PC tech "fixing" old IBM PS/2 machines by removing the hard drive and smacking it with the palm of my hand. So, I removed the hard drive from the console and tried powering it up. It worked fine. So I smacked the drive a couple of times and reattached it to the console. I powered it up again it it worked fine. I hope this is a one time deal!

I got Ubuntu installed. It was pretty painless. The installer is very easy to use and quick. Now I need to figure out which app to use to manage my iPod. There are a number of choices. I want one that works with pdocasts and syncs them properly to my iPod so they keep bookmarks. After that i need to get my T-Mobile MDA to sync with Evolution. If I can get those two things working, I think I'll be able to stick with it this time.

In my last post, I talked about giving Vista another try. That didn't work out so well. I ended up re-installing XP again a few days later. While my scanner did work, the ATI video driver did not.

Over the past ten years or so, I have made several attempts at switching to Linux as my primary OS. Every time I went back to Windows because there was always some application I needed to run or I would end up spending so much time tweaking my Linux install that I didn't really get to use my PC for anything useful.

It's time to try again. Not because I don't like Windows, but because every time I get all my software installed, my machine becomes deathly slow. I've been using the Ubuntu Live CD and I have to say I am pretty impressed. We'll see how it goes after I install it.