Well, this weekend, I finally went where no one has gone before.
I put Linux on my wife's computer.
Actually, I added a second hard drive and installed Kubuntu as the base system there. It's dual boot: Windows still sits on the first hard drive, hopefully one day to vanish in a deep dark cloud of 1's and 0's to a deserved obscurity.
It all came about when, one day, I booted up Windows to download updates and scan for viruses.
My wife is brilliant -- she's a Ph.D. student in Mass Communications -- but face it, there's only so many hours in the day. She could become a computer expert if she had the time . . . but she never has time. So I handle all the technical stuff behind the scenes.
Well, fifteen minutes later, I came back . . . and the computer was still booting. I tried to click on one of the desktop icons. The whole desktop disappeared. The hard drive was still thrashing about like a rattlesnake that's had its head chopped off by a weedwhacker. Loading WHAT? What could take 15 minutes to load into memory? What could be using so much CPU time?
Windows. Parasite programs. "Helpful" applications that boot up and try to update themselves every time the computer is turned on. The clutter in the system tray: each icon representing some garbage rolling around in memory, some process squatting on a patch of system real estate.
No more.
I loaded Kubuntu on the second hard drive. It boots to full readiness in under 3 minutes. Hannah was able to write documents and browse the web with no learning curve, no setup time, no configuration. And most of all, no parasite programs.
Hopefully, I've made another convert. We'll see.
Comments:
intrepideddie (February 12, 2008. 05:00am)
Ah, if I could only convince my wife to make the leap. Still clinging to Vista, she curses like a sailor every time it reboots after an update -- a process that usually takes 2 to 6 hours. Yes, HOURS. Meanwhile, I'm humming along on my laptop, using the Linux flavor-of-the-month. (I try them all to see which I like best.)
peahayes (February 13, 2008. 12:53am)
Windoze...
bmccosar (February 17, 2008. 10:50am)
Eddie, that's wild -- 2 to 6 hours?!? How much memory does the computer have, and how much does Vista require? I only ask because I upgraded Hannah's computer with about 4x as much memory, and it moves like lightning now (Linux, anyway ... Windows still takes a while to load, but not as much time as it did before).
intrepideddie (February 20, 2008. 06:37am)
It's a top-of-the-line PC (wasted on Windows, but I digress) -- has 2GB of RAM. Not sure how much Vista requires, but it should be chugging along pretty good on 2GB. Well, SP1 for Vista is coming out in March and should fix a lot of issues. (No, I didn't type that with a straight face...)