JDT |
John Dixon |
Switch to Linux and Breathe Life into Your Old Windows Machine |
|||||
|
In the late 1990s I bought a Dell laptop, preloaded with Microsoft Windows 98. It was a great little machine and I used it daily for a few years without any problems at all. After a while though I decided to upgrade it to Windows XP. I thought at the time that this was probably a mistake because the laptop only had 128MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive. I feared that the upgrade would kill the machine stone dead...and it did! I struggled on for a while, but the fact that it took 10 minutes to boot, and often gave the impression that it had died midway through performing an operation, I slowly moved the machine to one side and quietly forgot about it. It sat gathering dust for about a year or so and I was just on the verge of throwing it away when I thought I would try changing the operating system to Linux, after all, there was absolutely nothing to lose. I knew virtually nothing about Linux, so I did a bit of reading to try and establish which of the many 'distributions' I would go for. In the end I opted for Mandrake 10.1 (we're talking about 2004/2005 here). The installation went well, without any real issues along the way, and wow!, I now had a machine that could go back to being a productive work horse. The plethora of applications that come with Linux, especially the OpenOffice.org suite of applications, mean that you can do everything you need to do, just as well as with Windows. Don't get me wrong - I think Windows is great as well, but it costs a lot of money and it needs a pretty beefy machine in order to run recent versions of the operating system. Whereas with Linux you can take pretty much any Pentium machine and voila - you're away. So, if you're on the verge of ditching your old Windows machine, think again...maybe by switching to Linux you'll be able to get many more years out of the old beast! Go back to Software Articles home page
|
|
|||||
|
© 2007-2009 - John Dixon Technology Ltd |
|||||