It was one year ago today that I first installed Linux on my system. I backed up all important data onto 12 CDRs, then re-installed windoze 2000 using fat32, then installed Mandrake 9.0. On November 17, I backed up my system again (this time to another HD), and installed Redhat without windoze. Although my system can no longer boot windows, I may still have a few remnants lying around the directory where the windows partition was mounted (dlls, etc. windows tends to hide them from you). One of these days I'm going to go through and delete every last one of those things that aren't useful for running progs under wine. Sorry if I'm rambling, I've had too much caffeine.

Congrats jspenguin

I've been windoze free for a year and a half. You can really tell the difference when you have to set down to an MS machine. It's like going from heaven to hell

I still have to use windows when I go to my dad's house, though. He absolutely refuses to even try Linux. It's not too bad since I'm only over there once a week, and the only software I use on his machine is Mozilla Firebird. Last week I tried compiling this game I am writing on his machine. Needless to say, it crashed. Debugging it was a nightmare, because the game crashes even more often when I open it in MinGW gdb. My ideal environment for debugging windows programs is remote debugging from a Linux machine. It would still be a pain in the ass, but at least I wouldn't have to deal with windows so much.

Congratulations! I have been completely Windows free for a few months now, but I haven't used Windows (on my machine, at least) for God knows how long! I actually got rid of it by accident. I bought a Spanish Linux magazine (Mondo Linux) and they had a copy of OpenDarwin on the cover CD. So, I popped it in the drive and installed it... whilst holding a conversation with my brother-in-law. Oops! Wrong key! I managed to install it on the whole 40Gb drive rather than the 10Gb partition I set aside for it. D'oh! Not that it really affected me. Anyway, didn't work so I put FreeBSD on there instead.

And lastly - don't worry about the rambling... you get used to it And there's (almost) no such thing as too much caffeine!

Congratulations.
It just happens to be my Linadverisity.
I had 3 hard drives (on 2 systems) go down in less than a week.
Two with reported mechanical failure VIA the manufacturer's utilities and one with an apparently corrupted partition table. Only one has data I would like to recover. All those disks failing left me with only Knoppix to to get online as I attempt to pick up the pieces.
Looking forward to attempted recovery of files and complete multiple system reinstall. Already have the recovery game plan, the reinstalls will need more consideration.