As I wrote about on Friday, this was a busy work weekend for me. I think three of the computers I worked on offer an interesting comparison in operating systems.
One laptop was a brand new HP with 2 GB of RAM and Windows Vista, but the owner wanted me to install Windows XP and take off Windows Vista. He uses it primarily for traveling and downloading his digital photos while traveling and just didn’t like the lack of speed with Vista. The install of Windows XP went smoothly, but finding some of the XP drivers for it took quite a bit of looking around. All is running well now, and the with 2GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, the little laptop is very fast. Bootup time is under 70 seconds.
The next laptop was another Vista machine with 1 GB of RAM that a client bought for her mom who is a first time computer user and is 83 years old I believe. She will take the laptop with her to Connecticut next week. I took off all the pre-installed junk and installed AVG anti-virus and configured a Gmail account to work with Windows Mail (Vista’s version of Outlook Express). Because her mom has some sight problems, I bumped up the text size and DPI setting to make it easier to work with for her. Also, I disabled all of Vista’s fancy eye candy and effects. Despite all these tweaks, the computer still takes more than three minutes to fully boot up. And unless you experience it, I can’t adequately describe how slow Vista feels and operates.
On Friday, I described a third computer that I was working on for a customer who had a hard drive crash and HP’s recovery disks wouldn’t work. After talking with her about options, she decided to let me install Ubuntu Linux on the computer. I used the current 7.04 version and installed in under twenty-five minutes! This computer is probably four to five years old and has only 256mb of RAM, but still is MORE than powerful enough for Ubuntu. I setup her desktop to resemble Windows so she could make the transition a little easier. She is an AOL user so she will have to access that via AOL’s web interface, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It will be fun to see how she handles the transition to Ubuntu, and I will keep all of you informed of her progress.
The graphic I placed in this article is the final desktop configuration of her Ubuntu desktop, click on it to get a larger view.
By the way, the Ubuntu computer (the oldest of these three), boots up in under sixty seconds!
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