Yesterday I was very exited to discover that, overnight, my household computer inventory had doubled! My husband Ryan bought a new netbook to use for college, and a friend of ours gave us a desktop PC that they had laying around. Since the new shiny toy was Ryan’s, I claimed the unidentified PC as my own, and immediately went to work discovering just what it was capable of.

Problem number one: Whoever had owned the PC before had left their password in place on the Windows 7 operating system. I was locked out. I soon discovered that I could fix this by wiping the operating system from the hard drive.

Problem number two: I didn’t have a disk to reinstall the operating system once it had been wiped. Damn.

I had a few options. I could buy a new Windows disk, scrap the whole thing for parts, or get a free operating system to save my pocketbook…

Then the huge grin came to my face. I could install Linux.

To some this may be no big deal, but to a person who has always relied on good ol’ Microsoft this was MAD SCIENCE!

A few curses and about half an hour later, I had the new PC running Ubuntu, a Linux based OS. AWESOME!

Now comes the hard part. What the hell do with it?