Re: Say Goodbye to Windows XP - StartUbuntu Project
Hello, amjjawad.
I've been reading this thread with interest the last couple of hours! I have to confess to being absolutely amazed at the attitude of John McCourt in the very first reply to your thread - post#2. It may be alright for some people to throw away & buy new every couple of years (indeed, each successive offering from MicroSoft has more or less mandated such action), but I think some people are talking out of their backsides...
I've been using the 'buntus since May, having decided that nearly 13 years of XP was enough for anybody; yes, I liked it, but with EOL having passed, I felt I was ready for something different. John McCourt's assertion that the (then) current version of Ubuntu - which by my calculations would have been 13.04 - not being capable of running on XP machines has, perhaps, a shred of truth in it, if you take Ubuntu itself as the case in point. Unity, with its requirement for 3D acceleration, isn't really suitable for some of them, it's true....but this isn't the case for all, by a wide margin.
Case in point: I myself run 2 elderly machines. I was gifted a Compaq Presario desktop PC from my sister, back in January. It was running XP, EOL was fast approaching, and like so many non technically-minded people, she bought herself a new one with Win 7 preinstalled. I ran it till May, when I migrated to Ubuntu (I made the decision in less than 48 hrs!) I tried it out via Wubi; thought, "I like the look of this...", and wiped XP out of my life for good, and installed 14.04 in its place.
The Compaq has the amazing Athlon 64; the first commercially available CPU to natively run both 32- & 64-bit applications. It was the Pentium 4's direct competitor in the marketplace at the time; the machine dates from late 2005, and came with 1 GB RAM as standard, and a WD Caviar 'Black' HDD of 160 GB capacity; a fairly 'high-end' system for its day. My sister only used it for shopping on E-Bay & Amazon, and playing The Sims.....it had a very easy life! I've since uprated that to 3 GB, and will soon be increasing to 4 GB (I've got to replace the two 512MB sticks with 1 GB sticks, to get the extra 1 GB, and am limited to 4 GB by virtue of having DDR1 slots). The ATI Xpress200 integrated graphics chip copes with 14.04 without a murmur, and boot-up times are in the order of 45 seconds or so; impressive, compared to the 5+ minutes needed for XP.
I've just discovered the latest version of Puppy Linux; 'Tahrpup' 6.0. I tried out this little gem about a fortnight ago; my God, what a revelation...! With my current set-up, boot-up times are, well.....'quick' is an understatement. It runs from a flash drive, this being the way Puppy has worked for years, and it runs entirely in RAM, the installed size being somewhere in the region of 160 MB. I timed it from selecting 'Boot from USB', to the desktop being up-and-running this morning; 14 seconds..... Say 20-25 from powering up to being ready to use.....that IS impressive!
I've no sooner clicked on, say, Chrome's icon on the desktop, than it's open and ready. The same goes for every application I've got installed, plus all the pre-installed stuff that comes with Puppy as standard; how they get nearly 200 apps into 160MB I will NEVER know.....but the net result is an OS/machine combination that will beat the pants off just about anything else on the market for speed & responsiveness; including some very high-end stuff. It'll do everything I want it to; browsing, word processing, and a lot of graphics stuff......I've had an interest in graphic design for over 30 years. I run the GIMP, LibreCAD, Blender, and a little-known Windows app called PhotoScape, which I've not been able to find a direct equivalent to in Linux; this runs in Wine, version 1.7.32. So it's hardly 'lightweight', as far as features go; and it's the fastest setup I've ever found.....faster than my brother's top-end iMac, and my Mum's 3-yr old Dell Inspiron 15R, with a quad-core i5 & 6 GB of DDR3, plus a 750 GB HDD.
Now why on EARTH would I want to throw that away?
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I have an even older Dell Inspiron laptop; an original 1100, from 2002-3. OK, it's a 'brick'; the battery pack alone weighs more than a MacBook 'Air'.....but it still works perfectly, and has the nicest keyboard & touchpad I've ever come across in ANY laptop. It came with just 128 MB RAM, and a 20GB Hitachi Travelstar HDD, along with a Netburst-generation Celeron processor.....and running XP. It used to take nearly 10 minutes to boot-up! It now has 1 GB of RAM, and an 80 GB HDD.
I've installed 'Tahrpup' into a SanDisk Cruzer Fit 'nano' flash drive, which I leave permanently plugged into one of the 2 USB 2.0s on the back; the other is occupied by a TP-Link WN725N 'nano' wireless adapter. I now have another amazing system, which boots-up in about 40 seconds, and runs the same range of apps as the one on the Compaq. Before anybody asks, yes, you CAN install Puppy to the HDD, but it's not really recommended, as it was designed from the word go to run from a flashdrive for portability, and has been optimized for the kind of read/write speeds inherent in a flashdrive.....so I use the internal HDD purely for storage. It's been set-up for network printing, too.....so will print from the other 'Tahrpup' installation as the host.
And these kind of machines should be scrapped, or sent to the Third World as 'charity donations'?
Words fail me. If it ain't broke.....
Regards,
Mike. 
Last edited by Mike_Walsh; November 14th, 2014 at 01:05 AM.
Compaq Presario SR1619UK, running Xubuntu & Puppies 'X-Slacko' & 'Slacko'
Dell Inspiron 1100, running Xubuntu & Puppies 'TahrPup' & 'Precise'
IF the advice given has helped you, PLEASE have the courtesy to post back and say 'Thank you'..!
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Re: Say Goodbye to Windows XP - StartUbuntu Project
Originally Posted by amjjawad
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