This is a familiar dance; we end up doing this kind of clean install once every couple years. Seems safer than moving or copying the old hard drive. Perhaps it's a habit left over from Win9X, when reformatting and reinstalling Windows every so often was needed to recover from the creeping crud.
Now, Wine 1.0 is about to be released, and I happen to be the nominal release manager, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to see if I could migrate her to a Ubuntu / Wine box rather than a Windows XP box.
Power Structure installer has a z-order problem, you can recover with alt-tab.
TopStyle Lite gets very confused about not being able to embed IE, offers to save current document on top of its executable.
I'm still installing the above apps and filing bugs.
At this point I'm planning to buy and use Crossover Office 7 to run MS Office, but use Wine 1.0 to run most of the other apps.
These have Linux versions:
| Audacity |
| Celtx |
| Emusic Remote |
| Firefox |
| Thunderbird |
| Opera |
| Google Earth |
| Google Picasa |
| Nero SmartStart |
| NVu |
| RealPlayer |
These have Linux replacements:
| Windows app | Linux app |
|---|---|
| Camtasia | Istanbul |
| Windows Media Player | mplayer |
| McAfee | ClamAV |
These are bundled with XP, but have clones:
| XP app | Clone app | |
|---|---|---|
| Spider Solitaire | BVS Solitaire Collection | AppDB |
These don't seem to make sense to run under Linux, or have no equivalent:
| Belarc Advisor |
| AdAware 2007 |
| Spybot Search and Destroy |
| Spyware Blaster |
| Video Ads Blocker (is there a Linux equivalent?) |