Dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu

I’ve decided to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. This was a tortured decision for me to make, but the right one nonetheless.

While I’ve been able to do 99% of all my work and tasks in Ubuntu, it’s not always easy to do what I want to do. I have found that ease is more and more important to me as I have less and less time. When I want to buy a piece of hardware that will simplify my life, it should be easy to hook it up, install it, and get it running. Any delays, workarounds, and other distractions take away from the overall goal.

For example, I love my Quicken. I use it forecast, budget, and report on expenditures. I have One-Step Update running and all my passwords saved so it’s easy to download all my transactions. On Ubuntu, I have to run Quicken in a Crossover bottle. Yes, it works. But it wasn’t easy. And anytime there’s an upgrade or any issues, it’s not easy to troubleshoot and resolve.

I’ve gone paperless in my house, as much as possible. When bills come in, they get scanned then shredded. We’re also going through and scanning historical bills, statements, and other paper documents. We save everything as PDFs. Our scanners include dual-sided scanning via the ADF. The Windows driver works great with Adobe Acrobat. However, the driver for Linux supports only one sided scanning at a time. There is software to scan one side, then refeed the documents and scan the other side, and it will collate the images and let you save it as a PDF. But guess what? That’s right. It took work. Not easy.

The list goes on, of course. RAW image support in The Gimp takes longer to be released than Photoshop. Any new device may not work in Linux for some period of time. Etcetera, etcetera.

So I was able to install Windows XP on a separate HDD (which was supposed to be a mirror for my Ubuntu installation, but it wasn’t easy and I never figured it out). I did take the time to keep grub as the bootloader and I can successfully boot to either Linux or Windows.

Oh, one last word. Why Windows XP instead of Windows Vista or Windows XP x64? Guess. Not all drivers are available and compatible. That makes it… right… not easy.