The World's Forgotten, The Words Forbidden

Well actually...Hitachi/Toshiba/Anyone but Ubuntu kill.

Many people have no doubt heard about Ubuntu supposedly killing people's laptop hard drives. Turns out Ubuntu doesn't actually touch your hard drive power management settings, and its the BIOS or firmware on the hard disk which enables such aggressive power management.

Luckily there's a fix! I hate copy and pasting a load of commands into the terminal to fix a problem when I don't actually know what those commands are doing, but this one seemed pretty straightforward(ish).

How to fix the problem.

My load cycle count is now on 45,205 and only rising at the rate it should! I'm hoping that's normal for a hard drive that is roughly a year and a half old. Woopie! Still...ignorance is bliss, I thought hard drives magically lasted forever :(

The problem now is...I'm constantly listening to my hard drive and I'm paranoid every time it makes any kind of noise. Me thinks I'll save my monies and get myself a separate cheap laptop for Linux so that I don't have to dual boot with Vista.

Last problem to solve now...is to get Ubuntu to stop thinking my modem is my sound card and to get the bloody sound working!