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which OS would be faster for my pc?


colore

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I have to work on and install many laptops.

It's amazing to me how many are actually running as little desktops, always on AC power and almost NEVER on battery power.

But if you'll look in "Power Management" you'll see two separate settings,,, One for AC power and One for battery power.

Having the little 'puter throttled down while on AC power makes NO sense at all.

The only shut down setting I use is to shut down the hard drive after about 10 minutes of NO use. This reduces the amount of heat coming from the HD and lets the PC cool down between uses.

As for an OS for a laptop with only two gigs of ram and a not-too-fast CPU, XP would be the OS of choice.

If the little PC was made for XP, there probably would not be any hardware drivers for that PC that would be Vista compatible. Vista, if it would even install, would run dead slow on that PC.

It's absolutely criminal, that so many Laptops are coming out with Vista installed and only minimal ram and cpu's.

They would be better suited to run Windows ME. :whistle:

Since heat is the greatest foe of Laptops, I always tell my customers to NEVER set their laptop on a rug, bed or even their lap, since that will block the air intake ports on the bottom of the PC and inhibit cooling.

Good Luck with that lappy,

:thumbup

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I have to work on and install many laptops.

It's amazing to me how many are actually running as little desktops, always on AC power and almost NEVER on battery power.

But if you'll look in "Power Management" you'll see two separate settings,,, One for AC power and One for battery power.

Having the little 'puter throttled down while on AC power makes NO sense at all.

The only shut down setting I use is to shut down the hard drive after about 10 minutes of NO use. This reduces the amount of heat coming from the HD and lets the PC cool down between uses.

As for an OS for a laptop with only two gigs of ram and a not-too-fast CPU, XP would be the OS of choice.

If the little PC was made for XP, there probably would not be any hardware drivers for that PC that would be Vista compatible. Vista, if it would even install, would run dead slow on that PC.

It's absolutely criminal, that so many Laptops are coming out with Vista installed and only minimal ram and cpu's.

They would be better suited to run Windows ME. :whistle:

Since heat is the greatest foe of Laptops, I always tell my customers to NEVER set their laptop on a rug, bed or even their lap, since that will block the air intake ports on the bottom of the PC and inhibit cooling.

Good Luck with that lappy,

:thumbup

I AGREE with your comment about them shipping Vista out on machines with minimal RAM, but what option do they have really? There not allowed to use XP now as a pre-install, and they dont want to lose profit so they WILL ship with minimial cost/hardware :(

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That box should run XP great. I see no point in even suggesting Linux (not that it was even in his list of choices either).

No, Linux isn't the ultimate answer to everything (far from it), and all the Linux users who are always trying to push it onto everybody else can get pretty annoying.

-Linux free for ~3 months, and happier than ever.

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I would use XP SP3 for sure

depending on your knowledge of windows u may even consider tweaking & removing components in it to speed it up even more

i agree with the above post.. linux is fine if you want to use it, but for a "new" user or someone not heavily knowledgeable about scripting would find it very annoying

EDIT: just noticed this is my 4100th post!! lol

I've been a member here for along time!

Edited by MCT
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That box should run XP great. I see no point in even suggesting Linux (not that it was even in his list of choices either).

No, Linux isn't the ultimate answer to everything (far from it), and all the Linux users who are always trying to push it onto everybody else can get pretty annoying.

-Linux free for ~3 months, and happier than ever.

Its not the ultimate answer to everything, but its free and worth a try.

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but its free and worth a try.

People always bring up price, but I think that's mostly a non-issue. That $100 copy of XP (assuming it didn't already come bundled with the PC for even cheaper) lasted you like 7+ years. Big deal.

Worth a try? Been there, done that, no wasting time over it anymore. Here, he's looking for plain old Windows which just works, has worked fine for just about forever, and runs pretty much any app you'd ever want to run i.e. no reason to even consider switching to something else.

Linux mainly offers different problems. Things like:

-crappy support for a LOT of hardware (like ati vid cards -- thanks to fglrx and such, or wifi cards -- unless you resort to ndiswrapper and what not, webcams, etc)

-did I mention fglrx? because your box freezing hard a couple times a day or having to restart X several times a day isn't my definition of fun. Oh yeah, and LOTS of heavy flickering too (e.g. in Supertux). Oh ya, and the heat problems, and fan speed issues too. Yay.

-often not having 3D acceleration, and never having any of the cool and useful stuff like H.264 decoding done in hardware like you can on Windows (nor being able to watch Blu-Ray discs actually)

-an overwhelming choice of options (like GNOME or KDE or whatever) -- which most people actually DON'T want

-talking about choice, the choice between several audio systems, none of which actually works well

-various incompatible ways of doing things (e.g. different package managers & formats and having to use tools like alien to work around that)

-no need to use regedit -- just too bad you'll have to edit xorg.conf to set video resolution in the login screen and such things instead (100x worse IMO -- every single config file is 100% different for each app)

-lots of things are seemingly getting worse with every distro upgrade e.g. the god awful network manager garbage that comes with GNOME these days, or the switch to Pulse Audio

-themes that aren't really set centrally (each toolkit set has its own themes and fonts seemingly)

-having to install development tools & stuff, then download the source for ALSA everything (wget), then decompress it (tar), then recompile it (make, make install) & then editing the alsa config file (trying a dozen values) and then unmuting the IEC958 output from alsa-mixer -- all in a terminal, to have audio working over spdif, instead of that one checkbox to click under windows. Just a short glance at how to get it working here -- yeah, that's not complicated at all for your average end user!

-having to resort to tools like autocutsel for copy/paste to work at all in many scenarios (e.g. VNC)

-always running into problems over trivial stuff, and having to go such great lengths to fix it (like installing flash -- oh, you're not on the sudo'ers list? oh well!)

-Oh-so-shiny compiz fusion... Yeah, too bad metacity is a crashy POS (missing window borders 10x/day anyone?) and all that. Aero Glass may not be so cutting edge, but at least it's stable.

-flash audio always crashing (it's a underlying problem with how it uses ALSA), or not being able to have 2 apps make sound at once (thanks to pulse audio again) -- that's if your apps can even make sound at all using pulse audio...

-the update manager saying its up to date when sometimes it isn't

-ACPI just not working quite as good (especially compared to Vista's sleep which actually works great)

-having to resort to dpkg -i and such fun stuff to un-crash an app install rather often

-distro upgrades (i.e. apt-get dist-upgrade) crashing in general

-crappy fonts overall

-the lack of business software (no quicken, no tax return software, anything Adobe, very few CAD/pro audio/pro content creation/whatever apps or specialized tools overall, etc) -- I'd just make that "lack of software" in general really

-the lack of just about any games (save for WINE)

etc...

Yeah, it's like so much better than just running Windows, where stuff actually works, and where you have tons of great software for every task! :rolleyes:

I'm glad I gave up on it. Now if I could only have my time back...

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@darrelljon - You're forgetting one key aspect of this whole thread - it's a laptop. Linux still has spotty WPA support, poor suspend/hibernate support, and the power management is still relatively unsupported. The list that crahak posted is for general systems, but it gets even worse for laptops. Manufacturers have a tendency to use proprietary components that only they support, and they only support it for Windows. Those extra function keys? The touchpad functionality? All gone.

And I doubt that crahak falls into the category of "id***" when it comes to operating systems. I've got two workstations here - one Windows XP and one Fedora9. In terms of overall system usability (part of the argument in the thread you linked to - my computer is a tool), the Windows machine simply wins. There's simply too many times where updating the system breaks something. The latest example - updating my kernel broke my nVidia drivers. Honestly people... updates are supposed to fix things, not break them.

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You kinda remind me of this guy.

And you remind me of countless freetar^H^H linux users who just have to try to convert anyone to their inferior OS (forcing it on everyone so we can share their pain), advocating non-stop to people who don't want to hear it. It's like people from other religions ringing your doorbell Sunday morning at 7am "for your salvation" -- thanks, but no thanks!

Anyone who has actually used Linux for anything non-trivial would actually acknowledge most of those points. Hell, most of them are, by people who even made the things (e.g. the sad state of half-functioning audio, which the pulse audio dev admits to himself, or metacity crashing because of a "driver" problem with X and only works stable-ish using the latest dev builds, or in-depth instructions to do exactly what I said, that were written bu Linux users in wikis, etc). The fact that you don't makes me think you don't really know very much at all about the OS you're pimping non-stop, yet you have no problem going around calling others id-10-t's. But hey, feel free to refute any claim (not that you'll be able to).

Thanks for the funny link BTW. This guy manages to come across as a LOT dumber than the guy he tries to make fun of, showcasing his own ignorance -- and somehow being proud of it... The only thing he really managed, is to insult the other guy, making himself look like an angry little man in the process. "installed Linux on more than 10 computers" LOL. Yes, and I tied my own shoes more than 10 times, so I must know all about shoes, right? The GIMP better than Photoshop? That's got to be the funniest thing I read, ever (it must be a joke, no one can be that delusional)... Self-pwned pretty much.

Besides, I think you should get a Mac instead :P

Edited by crahak
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yeah XP SP3

I had Vista installed on our Family computer which is a Dell 4550 2.0ghz P4 1gig of PC2700, it ran Vista "alright" but it was soo slow. So I downgraded to XP and it works much more better now.

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you don't really know very much at all about the OS you're pimping non-stop, yet you have no problem going around calling others id-10-t's.

Actually I wasn't, I was comparing your Windows zeal to the Linux zealot. If you can't bring yourself to discuss some of the advantages (as well as the disadvantages you've mentioned) of Linux over Windows - or users who would find Linux better than Windows, then you've probably just proved my point.

Edited by darrelljon
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