Moving To Ubuntu: Part two

After running the Ubuntu Live CD, to check the compatibility of my PC hardware (see part one), the next step is to clean up my XP installation to free up as much hard disk space as possible. I will be dual booting for the time being, mainly because I need to access my work PC via remote access. This is through a Cisco VPN, which is Windows only. Also, it doesn't hurt to have a backup system, as who knows whether everything will work OK.

I uninstalled most of the software on the XP installation, save for Firefox, Thunderbird, the Cisco VPN software, and a few other programs that I have paid for. I moved all my data onto an external USB hard drive. After deleting all the original files, I then ran the XP disk defragmenter.

This takes quite a few goes to properly defragment - there may be thrid party tools that do a better job, but as I was trying to clean the disk up, I didn't want to install anything else. After the deragmentation is complete, make sure you view the report - this can show up a number of files that have been left behind by programs that have been uninstalled. As an example, I uninstalled Google Earth, but the report in the defragger showed a 400MB Google Earth Cache file that it could not move. These type of files can be manually deleted, but of course you will have to defrag again afterwards.

Something else that will leave lots of unmovable files is the XP System Restore. You may want to delete all previous restore points except for the latest. After doing this, another 6GB of space was reclaimed on my drive. To delete all previous restore points, select the More Options tab on the Disk Clean Up utility, and press the button at the bottom to delete all except the latest restore.

After performing these steps, there should be a sufficiently clean hard drive to install Ubuntu. As long as the defragger shows everything as far over to the left hand side of the drive as possible, then it is time to run the install. It doesn't matter if there are a few small gaps shown in the defragger, so long as there are no large spaces you won't be wasting too much space.

The only thing left to do before running the install is to export my mail from Thunderbird. The Ubuntu Migration Assistant will import bookmarks and some other files, but I don't think it imports mail. Once that is done, it is time for the install...