Windows Xp Pros And Cons

[Theo Pontbriand]

Im trying to dual boot Ubuntu alongside Windows on my laptop. I already know how to install it. A tutorial that I watched recommended selecting the Something else option of the Installation type screen of the Ubuntu installer rather than installing Ubuntu alongside Windows Boot Manager.

I'm confused about what are the pros and cons of the Install Ubuntu alongside Windows Boot Manager option. I created a partition in my hard drive. I want to install Ubuntu in the other partition, but I want also to choose the Install Ubuntu alongside Windows Boot Manager option. Is this possible, and is it safe to choose that option?

On a personal note, I would recommend you to stick with the "Something else" option only. The reason is that I have personally created issues with 4 laptop hard disks simply because I failed to understand the right process.

Choosing "Install alongside Windows boot manager" is safe, but please do take note of everything to avoid creating issues with your hard disk. If you are in any doubt, stick with the "Something else" option only.

Sometimes the Install Ubuntu alongside Windows Boot Manager option in the Installation type screen of the Ubuntu installer is the way that the Ubuntu installer incorrectly identified Windows, because that is the way that the existing Windows OS is identified in the system's configuration.

It's not always safe to choose that option. If there is already a Windows EFI system partition, the Ubuntu installer will often detect it and use the existing Windows system partition instead of creating a new one, but if the Ubuntu installer did not correctly identify the existing Windows OS it's possible that it also did not identify the partition that is used by the computer to boot Windows, if such a partition exists. In such a case it's possible that Ubuntu will not install the grub bootloader because it doesn't know where to install grub, and the entire Ubuntu installation will abort. If this happens you can still install Ubuntu by choosing the Something else option at the Installation type screen of the Ubuntu installer.

The EFI System Partition (ESP) is a partition on a data storage device (usually an HDD or SSD) that is used by computers adhering to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). The EFI System Partition is an interface that's used by the computer to boot Windows. It's like a step that is taken before it runs the Windows partition. It's a small partition, but without that partition your computer wouldn't know how to boot Windows.

The EFI system partition (ESP) is an OS-independent partition that acts as the storage place for the EFI bootloaders, applications and drivers to be launched by the UEFI firmware. It is mandatory for UEFI boot. source

I got my first iOS device, an iPod Touch (fourth generation), for Christmas in 2010. I was resistant at first, but eventually warmed up to it and grew to rely on it more than the braille notetaker I had used for over eight years. Given that positive experience with Apple, and all the comments about VoiceOver on the Mac I'd been hearing, I decided to give the Mac a shot. In 2011, I purchased the cheapest Mac I could, a low-end Mac Mini.

Having been trained on Windows for years, the first thing I did was install Windows on a Bootcamp partition. I used that OS almost exclusively for a year, for two reasons. First, I had no way to hook my monitor to the Mac, and that caused it to slow down, whereas Windows could run fine with no screen. Second, the Mac seemed a bit sluggish compared to Windows, and I was used to the instant response of NVDA, so I stuck with what I liked more, never really giving OSX a chance.

In 2012 I volunteered for five weeks at a school for the blind, helping to teach the students assistive technology. I brought my Mac with me--it is one of the most portable desktops I have ever seen, and I figured it would do just fine so long as I kept it booted into Windows (I was traveling to the school by bus, so had no way to carry an entire monitor with me). This would have worked out just fine, except that a rather nasty bug in a new speech synthesizer I was trying out at the time rendered Windows pretty much useless. Since I had no way to connect a screen to my computer, I could not even get sighted help to resolve the problem, so I was effectively unable to use Windows. My only other choice: finally give OSX a fair shot.

In the year and a half since, I have become a convert to OSX. I put more ram in my Mini, and got an adapter so I could hook up a monitor, and things are running fine. Below, I want to give the major reasons why I decided to use the Mac over Windows. I will then point out the downsides to the Mac that I have found so far. I will not spend much time on the features that are not directly related to accessibility. For example, the amount of content that automagically syncs between my Mac and iPhone is great, and is part of why I use a Mac, but it is not specific to accessibility and so will not be talked about.

Once you know VoiceOver on your Mac, you know it on every Mac back to 2005 or so. You can walk up to just about any Mac computer, hit command-f5, and have a familiar screen reader pop up. You can even put your VoiceOver preferences on a thumb drive, and VoiceOver on any Mac can use them in place of its defaults. It's sort of like carrying NVDA on a thumb drive, but better. You don't need to wonder which of the five major screen readers a computer might be running, if it has one at all; you don't need to try to figure out how to launch an installed screen reader; you don't need to worry about the computer not having an authorization and stopping your screen reader after forty minutes; you don't need to figure out which keyboard layout is in use, or what changes someone else might have made to key bindings. Any Mac running a reasonably modern operating system will have basically the same screen reader you already know.

Perhaps you're thinking, "but I've never encountered a Mac in the wild, so this doesn't matter to me"? I haven't either, but consider this. Last week, a friend of mine lent me his 2010 Macbook because it wouldn't boot. I booted into a recovery disk I already had on hand (which I created independently), ran some disk repairs, wiped the hard disk, installed Mavericks, and ran through the initial setup process. Through all that, I had to ask for sighted assistance only twice, once to ask what the computer was doing when it refused to boot, and once to see why it had frozen up (that second one I solved with a hard shutdown, and really, I didn't need to ask at all). Windows and Linux users could not do that. I've also worked on other macs, at home and with visually impaired students at a nearby school, and I never needed to install or worry about anything because each one had the same VoiceOver I already knew.

Since VoiceOver is so deeply integrated into the Mac's operating system, everything but the initial boot process is fully accessible. This includes setting up your new Mac, installing operating system updates and patches, accessing recovery mode, and other areas where Windows is not able to speak.

As long as I can remember, Windows screen readers have done really odd things. Freezing up, reading random image numbers, losing focus, sometimes reading more or less information than usual, and so on. In the case of Jaws, any system modification (such as adding RAM or installing a new version of Windows) would force you to re-authorize Jaws. Two modifications, and you had to get ahold of Freedom Scientific and ask them to reset your authorization count before you could use the full version of Jaws again. Yes, screen readers like NVDA don't have authorization problems, but they can still exhibit very odd behavior.

Is Voiceover perfect? No, of course not. However, I experience far less oddities with it than I did with NVDA or Jaws. When something strange does happen, it is usually a setting I changed and not Voiceover misbehaving. Yes, some apps have trouble with VoiceOver, most notably Xcode, but in general I find VoiceOver to be more stable and predictable than anything on Windows. It helps that OSX runs more smoothly than Windows, and that when a program locks up, the entire computer is not affected. If, for example, Firefox freezes on Windows, I cannot do anything with the machine until it eventually un-freezes or lets me open Task Manager, Through all that, of course, NVDA is silent. When an app freezes on the Mac, VoiceOver tells me the app is "busy", but I can use the rest of the Mac with no problems at all. It is very, very rare for my entire computer to lock up on me--in fact, I cannot remember the last time it happened.

NOTE: my comment about Xcode may lead some to think that VoiceOver is not well supported by Xcode. On the contrary, the two work together well. However, when VoiceOver is running, newer versions of Xcode can sometimes slow down. Such decreases in performance are not seen when Voiceover is disabled.

Apple's implementation of braille support isn't perfect, but it is good. The best feature is the automatic support for over forty displays right out of the box. I have never been able to get my BrailleNote Apex to work with Jaws or NVDA, yet it worked immediately on my Mac the first time I tried it. I can also easily customize the braille key assignments, getting rid of ones I never use and replacing them with commands I need. There is no need to find and fight with special drivers, restart your screen reader, find the proper com port, virtualize any ports, or anything else I've had to try in Windows over the years. Instead, the process is easy, fast, and, in my experience, reliable.

OSX has offered Realspeak voices from Nuance since OS10.7 Lion. It seems that, with each major OSX update, new or improved voices are offered; Mavericks brought us the latest "expressive" voices, including Oliver, Ava, and others. They sound great, and they are system-wide. That means that any app that can use text to speech can use them.

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