Experiences with Linux (Part 3)
At long last, I have found some time to write the third and final part of this Experience of Linux series. If you missed the previous ones - read the first one here and the second one here.
This post is basically about how Linux has saved my life a couple of times (metaphorically speaking).
Never mess with the Mighty DLL file!
So I was messing around with custom themes on my Windows PC. One of the instructions was to replace the shell32.dll file in the Windows folder with a customized one.
So I replaced my the file, and restarted my system. Everything was fine, but I didn’t like the new look my desktop had so I decided to switch back. This is where everything went wrong. Now the instructions were to rename the original DLL file with .old so Windows reads the new file. Now I made a mistake, I’m not quite sure what happened, but for some reason after I deleted the custom DLL file, I couldn’t rename the original to it’s (duh) original name (something about file permissions). So I was like, “OH SHIT!”. I restarted my system, and as I guessed the system didn’t start up.
Now, I was pissed off for making such a stupid mistake. I really didn’t want to reinstall Windows. Then I had the bright idea of booting using a Ubuntu disc. I realized that since Ubuntu used a different file system it wouldn’t recognize Windows file permissions. So I went into the system32 folder, renamed the original DLL file to what it’s supposed to be. Restarted my system, and voila! Windows now successfully boots.
A Hackintosh job gone bad
Now, you may know that I got a Macbook Pro a few months ago. I fell in love with OSX the moment I started using it. The love was so great that I wanted OSX on my desktop. I decided to go Google “hackintosh tutorials”.
I picked one of them which seemed it would work. I decided to go ahead and do it, but (obviously) it failed. I restarted my system, and Windows wouldn’t start. It would come to the loading screen and restart. Now, this is not a problem with a lost DLL file and I had to reinstall Windows. But I since I don’t do much backups (I know, I know) I would lose some data. So what did I do? I booted into Ubuntu and copied and files onto my external HDD. And I had gigabytes of files to transfer and for some reason I get way better USB transfer speeds than I would ever get in Windows (about 30 MB/s!).
Linux has yet again saved the day.
This brings me to the conclusion to this three part series. I hope you enjoyed these posts as much as I enjoyed writing them. And please comment!
