The Alternative OS

I have this old Compaq laptop that I really like because it is very thin and lightweight. The only problem is that it only has a P3 600Mhz CPU in it and Windows runs like a slug on it. It literally takes 7 minutes to boot up; I’m not joking or exagerating! I had heard that one way to breathe new life into your old hardware is to ditch Windows and install Linux on it. I had read good things about the Ubuntu distribution on the web, so I figured, what the hell, why not give it a try?

I downloaded the installation setup from the Ubuntu website and I had a choice of either making a dual boot setup or completely overwriting my Windows OS with Ubuntu. Since I don’t have a large enough hard drive to have both Windows and Linux on my machine simultaneously, the decision was simple… kill Windows! The installation process was very smooth with absolutely no glitches or warning messages. Once it found and configured all of the hardware (keyboard, mouse, etc.) it finished the install. I rebooted just to see how long it would take to boot up. I was very amazed that it finished booting in less than 2 minutes!

The Ubuntu distribution comes with Open Office. I fired up Office Write and Office Calc (the replacement for Word and Excel) and I was very pleased to find that it successfully opened all of my Word and Excel documents. Furthermore, since I’m not much of a “power user” in either Word or Excel, I found that I had no problems navigating, using commands/functions, changing fonts, etc. in Office Write or Office Calc. As far as I’m concerned, I never have to use Word or Excel again.

There are still many commercial applications that won’t run on the Linux platform. A couple of important ones for me are Adobe Photoshop and Quicken. I’ve heard people say that Gimp is a worthy replacement for Photoshop and that there is a suitable replacement for Quicken that will read Quicken files. I’ll have to give Gimp a try and do some research on the Quicken replacement. I will certainly keep my desktop machine running Windows just because I have a lot of time invested in Photoshop and I can’t see dropping Photoshop anytime soon. In fact a number of my “dyed-in-the-wool” Linux friends keep one Windows machine around just for this very reason. I’m guessing that Microsoft must be paying Adobe big bucks under the table not to port Photoshop to Linux!

I still have a number of things left to try out before I can safely say that I’m 100% sold on Linux. So far I’m very happy with Ubuntu running on my old laptop which I’m primarily using as my email and web surfing machine. It certainly boots and runs much faster than when I had Windows 2000 running on it. Let’s just say that I’m 99% sold on it!