When I gave my wife the big server machine, we set her old one aside as a guest machine. It also collects the stuff I do which simply requires something Win-DOS. It’s at least twice the machine as this laptop, an Everex with a 2.2Ghz Athlon, 1GB RAM, and a good solid Radeon 9200 card I added later (64MB VRAM), because the built-in graphics chipset stinks (S3 Unichrome). But it runs XP, so that means, even with the fastest AV I could find (I purchased Sunbelt VIPRE), it still runs slow. Further, it still has the Windows GUI.
Ick. It only runs what Windows will run. That’s not much, considering most all the stuff I really like runs only on Linux/BSD. Or, in some cases, the Linux version works differently than the Windows version. Sure, it’s handy sitting there, already up and running full time, but it’s not Linux.
I admit there were moments when I just got sick of Linux and BSD when nothing would run properly on the limited hardware I had at the time. There were some rough patches in the past when nothing in the *nix world was going right, it seemed. We are in a rough patch right now with X.org, GNOME and KDE all sucking huge power profiles and offering darn little in return. That is, unless you just gotta have your eye-candy. I can do with that. That’s part of the reason I really love older, stable Linux distros like CentOS.
I’m not sure what I’ll do should this laptop stop working, or when the support cycle for CentOS 5 runs out. Perhaps that’s the day I’ll start running almost entirely on the framebuffer console. Either way, I can’t go back to XP, and what has followed it from Redmond is even worse.
I’ve actually come to appreciate XP since the Vista disaster… I guess it is a matter of relative perspective!
That doesn’t sound like a machine that should run XP slowly, though. I wonder if something is the matter?
Perhaps it’s the bus speed or something, but this thing has never been all that fast. This was mostly a subjective experience post, not a tech piece.