I've had an interesting time this afternoon. I took delivery of a
laptop (HP Compaq 6720s [1]) for a colleague and wanted to make sure
it worked before passing it on. It had Windows Vista Home Basic
installed.
When I switched it on it had to finish the install of Vista, e.g.
setting the locale etc.
To get from that first switching on, to a system with recovery DVD's
(none were supplied so you have to burn your own), and the Windows
updates done, and firefox installed, and Adobe Reader installed, and
OpenOffice installed, took no less than 4 hours. 4 hours! I lost count
of the restarts it did.
For a bit of fun I then put in an Ubuntu 8.10 disk. From that point to
having a working dual-boot install of Ubuntu took 45 minutes. 15
minutes of that was resizing the Vista NTFS partition to make space
for the swap and linux partitions, and most of the rest was copying
the files from the CD to the disk.
In summary it takes 4 hours just to finalise a 'pre-installed' Vista,
and 30 minutes to install Ubuntu from scratch.
The other truly awe inspiring thing is how incredibly slowly Vista
runs on a quite powerful laptop with 1GB RAM. I really don't think I
could stand to use a system as slow as that, and there were no Aero
effects enabled either (not an option with Vista Home Basic). In
contrast Ubuntu was pulling its compiz eye-candy tricks with no
problem at all. A typical comparison is that Vista took 45 seconds to
shut down, Ubuntu less than 15 seconds. The start up time for Vista
was around 90 seconds, for Ubuntu less than 30.
In case anyone is thinking of buying the laptop, everything ran under
Ubuntu out of the box - sound, accelerated graphics, wireless lan,
even suspend and hibernate. But if you want to run Vista much my
advice would be: don't!
(btw If you boot the HP recovery partition /dev/sda2 out of curiosity
it hoses the grub mbr - oops! Easy enough to recover using the Ubuntu
live CD)
ATB, Peter
[1]
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=58M6
