On Sunday 06 July 2003 11:30, expatriate wrote:
Hello My wife is considering "upgrading" all of her company's PCs to Linux instead of continuing on the Microsoft wagon. In order to test the impact on the average user, she requested I convert her home machine to dual-boot so she could experience the issues. Her home machine is an ASUS P2BF with a Pentium III 450MHz , 128MB RAM , 120GB 7200rpm IBM HD (33MHz ATA though on the Motherboard) and a Diamond Viper V770 (NVidia2 TNT2). I chose KDE since I have many niggling issues with GNOME. Her first impressions so far are: "It is slower to boot" "It does not start up applications as quickly as W2K" (OpenOffice definitely loads more slowly than Office2000) "Repaints take longer" (When shifting windows around)
Mind you, she has an MSEE and is definitely not a Microsoft drone having studied UNIX in college. However, she is concerned that her organisation will have trouble adapting to a ""less responsive" OS on the older machines that are now running Windows 97 and 2000.
Does anyone have a different experience?
Put more RAM in the machines, 128 is not enough for a good result. I leave both the machine and its applications running for weeks at a time (try that with Windows), so start up times don't bother me. If I'm working on several apps I leave them on different desktops rather than dragging the windows about, but I can't say I've seen a problem. RAM is your answer - should cost a lot less than those licences! 33MHz ATA isn't too wonderful, but you'll get acceptable results at 256MB and over.
TIA & cheers
-- Fergus Wilde Chetham's Library Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB Tel: +44 161 834 7961 Fax: +44 161 839 5797 http://www.chethams.org.uk