If you're not into geeky stuff, you may-as-well leave now.

Sat here in my room, I have a Dell Studio XPS 8100 machine. The specs look good; it has a Intel i7 processor, enough RAM to keep me happy and a RAID set up totaling 2 TB of disk space. I'm running Windows 7 and whilst it seemed okay when the machine was brand new, it seems really slow and cumbersome these days. So much so that I decided that it might be a good idea to install CrunchBang Linux (#!) as my default OS and only boot into Windows when I want to do work in Photoshop, play Football Manager or other such tasks.

I just downloaded #!, put it on a USB stick and booted into the Live version. It was so fast - completely loaded before I could even think about it. I must install this.

Unfortunately for me, I know NOTHING about having your hard drives set up as a RAID. All I know is that I have two 1TB HDD in my computer and that one is backing the other up (that's how they work, right?). Since all my photos, music and 'work' is solely on these hard drives and I have no externals to 'back up' to, I'm pretty uncertain about partitioning the hard drives to accommodate for a #! installation just in case I manage to destroy everything.

I guess I'm going to play it safe and have to wait a while - at least until I can get out to the shop and buy a big external HDD to store all my irreplaceable data. In the meantime, if anyone has any advice or useful links about how I can give my Windows 7 installation a 'spring clean' or any information about RAID drives on #! / Debian, that would be great.