Monday 18 April 2011

Bye bye XP

It's been a busy week and there has been precious little time for blogging. However, my daily cycle to work has given me plenty of time to think about my recent OS benchmarking exercise.

To be honest, I am rather fond of XP: I found it to be a stable version of Windows and it rarely let me down. Nonetheless, I've blogged before on the relative cost of running a Windows system as opposed to Ubuntu and a boot time of over four minutes seems a lifetime to wait in this age of smart phones and PDAs. It may have taken a week but I finally decided to bite the bullet and convert my Inspiron 6400 to Lucid Lynx.

The upgrade was painless; partly because, over the last two years, I've accumulated quite a lot of experience of upgrading operating systems but mostly because Canonical makes migration to its flagship OS so damned easy! I have no hardware issues to report and the 160GB hdd is properly partitioned with a boot partition and a /home partition, so future upgrades should be even easier.

In some respects I'm sorry to realize the demise of Windows XP but the truth is that it was inevitable: as a Windows machine, the 6400 was seeing less and less use and that was just a waste of a great laptop. Of course, the upgrade also means that there is no reason not to try out Maverick Meerkat on my Inspiron 1501 test machine!

I am still using Windows on a couple of machines, but it won't be very long before my personal network is entirely open-source and I confess that, when I started this journey, I never thought that possible.

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