While my laptop remains and has always been Ubuntu, my two home machines are Windows XP. On the older box, the one I’ve surrendered to the kids, there’s really no excuse. They really only use the internet at this point and they could easily adapt to the change in interface so its days are numbered.

The newer XPS box has a bit more longevity due to some of the apps we use. I’ve been using Windows Movie Maker a lot, but I’d easily give it up for Kino or Cinelerra. The current sticking point is Media Center. The XPS box is our DVR which we connect to from our XBox 360. I hate to give up that setup (Yes, I know about MythTV).

Anyway, a week ago the XPS box started showing symptoms of the MSBlast worm. It went from bad to worse very quickly and ultimately became totally unusable. It couldn’t even stay up long enough for me to troubleshoot the problem.

At that point it was Ubuntu to the rescue! I booted off the Ubuntu live CD, mounted the Windows partition, rsync’d everyone’s data directories to my LaCie drive, and then used Dell’s built-in Symantec disk restore to put the disk drive in the exact state it was in when the machine was delivered. After copying the data back to the machine I’m up-and-running and no worse for the wear. Thanks, Ubuntu!