I defiled Bagend today

Long-time readers may remember that the new PC I built for myself back last Fall is named Bagend. Heretofore, it's been running SUSE Linux Professional, first v9.0, but soon upgraded to v9.2. Since I picked up my iBook back in December, it's been mostly idle, though.

Today, I defiled it. I backed up all my data to DVD-R, wiped the drive, and installed Windows XP.

{Pauses to let the screams die down.}

I have need of a Windows box, and more importantly, need to be able to print to my Samsung ML-1710 printer over the LAN. I was able to get the printer working OK locally, but never got SUSE configured right to let me print from other local hosts. Printing in Linux still sucks, IMHO, and I don't have the time to dink with it.

The Windows install went pretty smoothly. I couldn't find the driver CDs for my Asus A7N8X-X mobo or Asus/ATI Radeon 9200SE video card. Bagend has a 3Com 3C-905TX NIC in it, so the fact that XP didn't see the onboard nVidia NIC wasn't fatal, nor was XP's inability to see the onboard Realtek AC-97 audio. I downloaded the drivers from Asus' website and got them both working. I'll yank the 3Com card for my parts bin eventually.

The box is running smoothly under Windows. It's pretty fast, with an AMD AlthonXP 2200+, 512 MB of RAM, and an 80 GB hard disk (35 GB for C: with the rest for D:).

So far, I've added a bunch of my regular Windows programs:

• AVG Free Antivirus
• Spybot Search & Destroy
• Lavasoft Ad-Aware PE
• CoreFTP
• Quicktime
• Firefox
• iTunes
• Cygwin
• Irfanview

I'll install OpenOffice.org, a PDF creation tool, and other stuff as time goes on. Since I don't anticipate burning a lot of discs, I'm probably going to use CDBurnerXP Pro for CD and DVD creation.

Excuse me, I need to go wash.