There, I said it. I never thought I'd miss Windows this much. The XP variety, that is.
About a month ago, I was really all fired up about Ubuntu - and rightly so. From the horror stories of how complicated Linux is, Ubuntu's real-world experience (and looks) were amazingly great. Of course, then I realised that despite how great the open-source community was, it still had its limits. And the cruncher for me was that the email application, Evolution, didn't quite agree with the wierd resolution on my Eee PC.
So I ventured into loading an old copy of Windows I had lying around onto the Eee. It wasn't as simple a process as I had thought. Simply borrowing Kelvin's USB external CDROM drive wasn't enough as somehow, my Eee PC refused to boot from the CD. Resignedly, I had to search up instructions to install XP via a USB stick. Follow the instructions step by step and you shouldn't get into trouble.
After the install, I realised just how capable a machine the Eee 900 is for Windows XP. Boot up time is a respectable 18 seconds, even if it's not the 13 seconds promised by nLite (I ended up not using nLite). I've done manual cleaning and disabled stuff I don't believe I'll ever use.
I gave it a test run with Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Office 2007 and it works great. Documents open pretty fast (about 2 seconds) and the browser didn't stutter none. It might be because I have 2GB of RAM.
Shifting back from Ubuntu to XP, I realised just how under appreciated Windows is in general. Sure, a lot of times, we think it's the most boring operating system out there - wowed by the Mac OS and fancy Linux builds. But in its own way, XP is elegant and simple too. For one, I found the launch bar at the bottom (a la Mac, which I insisted on having in Ubuntu) was more pretty than useful. The Windows Start Bar method still appeals to me.
Also, maybe I'm just a noob, but I understand how applications ,files and folders work on XP a lot better than I did on Ubuntu. There's a certain logic to how Windows works and, maybe its because we were mostly brought up on Windows but, it DOES make computing simpler.
The one thing I loved best about the whole process? The untouched, unsullied desktop. I'd like to see how long it lasts :)
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
I never thought I'd miss Windows this much
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2 comments:
Haha...I'm a geek and maxing out Linux as much as I can in all its glory (as well as various other distros) felt like one of the highlights to that geekiness.
Come to think of it though, Linux was never that hard, even with no knowledge of it (I'm not even close to being a programmer). Then again, I always like to custom build my GUI's with a kinda minimalistic interface.
So even my Windows has no taskbar or icons instead opting for a split dock (one to display the Windows task on the bottom and one to display my system tray on top). I also opted for a command line interface to call up any program I needed.
That being said, the reason why I like Linux is because I can make these changes without much hassle at all. On my Eee, minimalistic = lots of space saved and I use the 800x480 so that says a lot on what can be done by tweaking a lot of settings.
Haha... yeah, that's why next to you I'm such a N00B! Well, the reality was that the applications I wanted to use adjusted much better on XP to the wierd resolution than with Linux. At least I know how to edit the .INI files of some games to "force" 1024x600 resolution.
I still have a copy of Ubuntu installed though. On my Dell 8200 Inspiron and I love how that OS is giving new life to my giant hunk of junk (kidding, I love that machine - it's still alive and kicking after 6 years!)
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