Web Talk

Lately, the computer world has seen the birth of a lot of ultraportable laptops. These little jewels are so small  they can be packed in your bag or briefcase. That’s quite wonderful, isn’t it? Because of their small dimensions and their cheap prices such ultraportables are not stuffed with the latest hardware and this means that most of them can not run Windows Vista for example. In fact, it requires powerful and expensive hardware which could leaven the laptops in term of money and dimensions. That’s why, 9 times out of 10, if you buy an ultraportable  it will come with a bundled Windows XP . Now, we know pretty well that this operating system is not that new, but here comes the big news. In fact, thanks to a small free utility, now you can install Linux (Ubuntu, for example) along with XP with no harrassment and little knowledge and have them as a choice on dual boot.

Gparted is a freeware, simple software which is able to resize your XP partitions. Now, if you don’t know what I am talking about you have to know that XP, differently from Vista which has got a built in disk management to resize a partition, has no way to resize partitions in order to make room for a new operating system. Gparted is meant to overcome this issue. But let’s see together what sptes you have to follow in order to have two operating system on your PC.

1. Defragment your XP hard drive in order to have a tidy hard disk, ready to be resized.
2. Insert GParted Live CD into your cd drive and reboot your computer. Follow the simple steps which will let the software know something more about your PC.
3. Select the partition to resize and click Apply. The resizing process will take place and it will last depending on how much data the software will have to move.
4. Now, take the GParted Live CD out of your hard drive and reboot your machine.
5. Now reboot  your PC with your Ubuntu in the drive and install it.

I know pretty well that this little tutorial may looks like too small, but this is what you have to do, for real! Installing Ubuntu is far less troublesome than having your partitions resized!