Sean Gibbins wrote:
> My brother-in-law has just bought one of these:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2oy85p
>
> Which basically equates to a 'FUJITSU SIEMENS AMILO LI1705 1G' with the
> following spec:*
> *Processor speed: 1.73 GHz
> Processor: Intel Pentium Dual Core
> Screen size: 15 inches
> Storage (hard drive): 80 GB
> Memory (RAM): 1024 MB
> OS Windows Vista Home Basic
>
>
---8<--- snip --------
> So, the Friday fun queston is: do I trash a perfectly good OS* and
> rebuild with Ubuntu** or leave well enough alone?
A bit of an update.
Basically given the short period of time I had to get it online I ended
up leaving Vista on there with Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice being
installed to provide the basic functionality that Steve, my bro-in-law,
requires.
I tried Feisty and Gutsy, with both proving problematic in terms of the
wifi card (which will be needed after all), the modem and the display.
Knoppix fared better with the display so I think I could probably sort
that quite quickly, but the other two items looked like they were going
to present the sort of challenge that, even if successfully worked
around, would have come back to bite me on the bum regularly at upgrade
time.
I removed the 3-month version of Norton Security Everything that was on
there and replaced it with AVG, Spybot and Adaware. A quick trip to
www.grc.com 'Shields Up' (boo hiss!) showed that the Windows firewall
was effective on dial-up (i.e. not just behind my router), so Zonealarm
appeared to be surplus to requirements, which is just as well given the
difficulty I had in pulling in the free edition.
VMware Converter was having none of Vista, and again time constraints
stopped me dead in my tracks there.
Vista Home Basic looked to me like an updated, shiny XP, with familiar
controls having been renamed and moved around and leaving the impression
of it being essentially XP + DRM + sugar coating. Considering the spec
of the laptop it felt slow and the first boot took an absolute age - 20
mins - because of the (non-trivial) setup stuff. Also, I reckon around
20% of the 80GB drive was taken up with the basic install as provided by
Fujitsu Siemens, which is a bit of a shocker really, considering there
were no applications included as such.
Some of the gloss looked quite nice, but to be honest I didn't delve
deep and I don't think I shall bother going any further for the time being.
My bro-in-law is happy and if it all ends in tears in a few months time
I should be able to work around the modem/wifi issues by then. Thanks
for all the suggestions all the same!
On another related note my mate has just bought a beast of a machine [1]
which I am told plays 'X2 - The Threat' at 1024 x 768 (with all
graphics features enabled) at 385 frames per second! Anyway, to steer
this back on topic back on-thread-ish Gutsy Gibbon went on there
effortlessly, which is just as well on account of Feisty struggling with
some aspects of the install!
Sean
[1] Coolermaster Stacker 832 Tower Case [Black]
Xilence 1000W Modular PSU
Asus Blitz Extreme Motherboard
Intel Q6850 Quad-Core 64-bit CPU, 3.0GHz default clock speed,
overclocked to 3.6GHz
2 x OCZ 2Gb DDR3 PC3-12800C7 1600MHz Platinum Enhanced Bandwidth Memory
(2x1Gb) Dual Channel DDR3 - in dual channel mode, overclocked to
1920MHz, total 4Gb
BFG 8800GTX GPU, Water-Cooled, 768Mb RAM, overclocked by 20%
Adaptec 29160N PCI 64-bit SCSI Adapter
HP DAT-72, 72Gb DAT Tape Deck
2 x 160Gb Western Digital SATA HDDs [fitted to the SATA Caddy units and
RAIDed for data striping as a single 320Gb volume]
2 x 500Gb Seagate HDDs [partitioned as 2x128Gb FAT32, 1x128Gb NTFS and
1x100Gb Ext3]
2 x [Unknown Make] Dual-Layer DVD-RW/RAM Drives (SATA)
Alphatec Silentstar Dual Water-Cooled Hard Drive Bay for 2xSATA HDDs
Creative X-Fi PCI Sound Card
Swiftech "Ultra" water cooling kit with dual radiator
Multi-Format USB Memory Card Reader in 3.5" Drive Form Factor
