Bitter Mint - Part I

Around 1 year ago I bought a Windows 7 HP Compaq PC, for a customer, from PC-World. I installed the software & tried to marry this PC with an ELO touchscreen... One little problem, the PC hangs on boot until I remove the ELO touchscreen USB cable, but after it boots and I plug-in the USB touchscreen, everything seems to work just fine...

The customer complained, so I swapped the PC with another generic unit. This setup worked perfectly and the customer was happy...

A few weeks later, I tried to flog the same PC to another customer, and this time also, I had the same exact boot & bios issues, so I just left the PC on one side, until I have a chance to investigate it further, sell it or use it myself.

All attempts to change boot delay, or to ignore USB devices during booting failed.

For a while now, I have been thinking of moving my software base away from Windows and into Linux,so I thought what better way than to start with a dual boot set-up on this machine. 2 birds, 1 stone...

I have used both LinuxMint, & UBUNTU in the past, but I thought to read a few reviews as with regards to the most stable and suitable distribution, and I opted for the following 3 candidates...

[1] Linux Mint 15 Olivia - 64-bit
[2] Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - 64-bit
[3] Zorin OS-7 - 64-bit

So before rediscovering the wonderful world of Linux, I had to connect the PC to the internet and download the ISO images for the preferred Linux Distros.... During that time, Windows 7 decided to get on the act and download and install a few security updates - 110 to be precise, starting from 12:45PM until 6:30PM, before a reboot and another 27 minutes installing the updates...

After a quick 7 hour update and a reboot, I decided to install Linux Mint first to see what I was missing... The setup went smoothly with no discernible hiccups or problems...

Continues....