A few weeks ago, eWeek ran an article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols entitled “Cheap Laptops Bad for Vista, Good for Linux“. In the article, he talks about the number of cheap laptops that people are buying up that aren’t capable of running Vista — but are quite capable of running Linux just fine.
Working in IT at an .edu, this is something I’m all too familiar with. I wish our Help Desk had kept count of how many students had come to them for assistance with their cheap laptops running Vista. I remember just a year or two ago and we were aghast at people who were running XP on laptops with only 256MB of RAM. Now it’s Vista laptops with just 512MB of RAM that we’re seeing.
Last Friday, someone poked their head into my office to let me know that a man and woman I knew wanted to talk to me. When I went out to talk to them a few moments later, it was the same thing I’ve heard countless times before. They had a laptop running Vista and were having issues. Besides the usual “it’s slow” routine, they said it had become completely unusable after the latest round of Windows Updates (the neverending “reboot, BSOD, reboot, BSOD” cycle). The laptop had came with Vista and they suffered through it up until this point. I knew what was coming and I tried to avoid it, but I finally gave in. I told them I’d blow it away and install XP for ‘em.
I learned a long time ago never to accept payment from friends because when their laptops screw up again, they’ll expect you to fix it again — for free, of course. Since this was late in the afternoon on a Friday and I had plans for the evening, I gave ‘em the “I’ll do it, but I can’t promise when I’ll have it done” spell. That was fine with them; the laptop was useless anyways.
When I finally got around to working on it, I watched it boot up and was surprised — I don’t know why — to see it was a 1.7GHz Pentium Mobile sporting a whopping 512MB of RAM. Who in their right mind would try to run Vista on that!? Anyways, long story short, I blew away Vista, reinstalled XP, got it back to ‘em and they’re happy as hell — the laptop is running faster than it ever has.
Now, back to the eWeek article… Vaughan-Nichols goes on to talk about how any modern Linux distribution (such as Fedora) will run great on these laptops, and he’s right. Every since I started using Linux over 10 years ago, it’s been possible to run it on hardware that Windows would choke on. I get better performance from my much slower Linux machines than I do from my better equipped XP machines, and I’m much more demanding of the Linux machines.
I’d love to convince these people to use Linux instead of Windows, but I just can’t. To do that would be to volunteer myself to be their first line of “tech support” and I just don’t have the time for that. These people aren’t interested in tinkering with their PCs, they just want ‘em to work.
Ironically, that’s one of the reasons I’ve never been a big fan of “Linux on the desktop”. All that tinkering is great for a while, but it gets old pretty quick. I used to love to constantly tweak my Linux machines, always downloading, compiling, and rebooting into the latest kernel just moments after it was released. Once I started having real work to do, however, I cut that out. Now, like most consumers, I just want my computers to work so that I can get my work done.
That’s one of the reasons I just ordered a MacBook…
Recent Comments