My patience with Microsoft Vista came to an abrupt end last week. I have a fairly new Toshiba widescreen laptop. AMD x2 proccessor, plenty of ram and hard drive space. It was zippy and fast and I never had a problem with it the first year. Then gradually I noticed with new updates, new processes began running in the background. It reached a point where it was using 35-40% of the system resources while completely idle. The symantec framework for Norton began to fail regularly. I purchased a fresh copy of Norton to renew the license and hopefully correct the issues…no such luck. BSU’s network utility for logging on began to fail. Booting up took 20 minutes and often required a restart. CD’s and DVD’s stopped autoloading. Video began failing. The list goes on and on.
So Monday, I had it….I said farewell to MS Vista. Buh Bye. Bon Voyage. I’m done. I backed up my files and nuked the hard drive.
I setup an install disc for Unbuntu 9 and joined the Linux crowd. (An inevitable step considering I’m in school to be a Software Developer)
I’m in love with my laptop again. IT’s fast. Everything works better than before. The only negative is that Kodak does not provide linux drivers for their printers. This is a minor hindrance compared to what I was dealing with before. (I’ll just “print to pdf” and then plug a thumb dive into the printer to print).
Wine is a great new development that acts as a shell/virtual machine for Windows software. I set it up – Office 2007 and Dreamweaver run just fine on it. I got everything I need for development- Libraries, my fave IDE’s (netbeans, & bluesfish) gVim, Dia & some other app which name I forget for building UML diagrams. It’s ready to roll for another school year.
Audio & video works better than it ever did on Vista. I miss it NOT!
Cheers!
1 Comment
July 17, 2009 at 5:20 am
all linux need is a good virtual machine soft with complete libraries, wine is getting there..