Pretty please?

Maybe it was the bad things I said earlier, or maybe a more technical reason (rather than an emotional reason, and I do know that computers have emotions, because HAL tried throwing every damn human being he could out of the airlock in 2001 Space Odyssey - and that was 5 years ago!), but Ubuntu doesn't want to let me do lots of things.

Most notably, looking at my windows partition. Which is really unfortunate, because if I can't read or save on my windows partition then how exactly am I supposed to swap files between my operating systems easily?

I put a word document together in the (very good) office suite called Open Office. All was good so far. So I went to save the document so I could open it up in MS Word later (a crucial test - if I can't open this stuff in Word then it totally rules out working on university documents in Ubuntu). So I saved the document to my desktop. I then double clicked on the shortcut icon for my windows drive, so I could copy the file over. No can do, it won't let me look at it. So I thought i'll just leave it here, reboot and try and open it from the Linux drive in Windows. No can do. So how the hell do I copy the file over?

I put some ideas up. USB pen drive? No, don't own one. CD? Good god, that'll be annoying and costly. Email the files to my own in box? Great for 1MB files maybe, but what if I need to use a big file in both operating systems?

Nope, my answer, as with most problems i've encountered so far: Google.

So, after about an hour of trying to get my head around these things, I was back on the command line, throwing in some sudos and gedits, copy pasting stuff, learning the finer points of linux partitioning, and eventually I figured out a way to make the computer let me read and write to my windows drives. Why this operating system doesn't let me do it by default is well and truly beyond me.

But after wasting that hour of my life it now works how I want it to. It's a shame it didn't work like that by default, as it thoroughly crippled the dual-boot-ability.

But geez I like Open Office. For the record, it saved my word document very well. I'm tempted to put together the highly-formatted-document-from-hell to test just how good it is at saving in word format. But for my needs it's perfect, and it doesn't cost 500 bucks! Score!