I’ve been running Linux pretty exclusively lately. I copied Windows over to a partition on the new disk, but it doesn’t boot. (Apparently Windows doesn’t like booting if it’s not near the front of the disk?) So when I want to run Windows, I’ve just swapping hard drives. Tonight I had a hankering to play some Counter-Strike, so I put in the Windows drive.

Some observations:

• It takes a lot longer to boot. (This isn’t necessarily a function of Windows itself.)
• After starting Steam (the engine CS uses), I walked away for a minute. When I came back, my computer was showing me the school’s AUP for their network. I’d been using the network for a few days under Linux.
• About 20 minutes into the game, I got disconnected. I noticed that my disk activity light was on solid, so I just closed the game to see what was going on. (I should note that heavy disk activity shouldn’t have been game-related: between having 2GB of RAM with nothing but CS running, having been on a small, simple map, and having been in the map for a while, there was really no reason to go to the disk.) When I closed it, I saw that the Windows firewall had decided to block “hl2.” I’m not even joking: like 20 minutes into the game, Windows decided to block it from accessing the network. At least it was kind enough to not steal focus from the game. (Others could learn from this!)
• I still have no idea why it was going to disk.
• Shift+Backspace doesn’t crash anything.
• I’m getting barraged with updates to things. My wireless drivers updated themselves. Steam updated three games plus its core components. Konfabulator wants to upgrade, too. Photoshop updated itself the other day… Ubuntu and MacOS X both have a centralized ‘Software Update’ checker, which keeps everything in one place…
• I miss iTunes. (Apple, are you listening? Wine developers, are you listening?) Linux has a lot of nice media players, such as Amarok and XMMS, but really, nothing beats iTunes. Especially when you own lots of iTunes music…