This is the OS everyone still uses? Damn, what a piece of shit!
Seriously though, I’m doing more contract work / web development now and I needed to find a way to test IE6. I bought a used laptop for $150 CAN on craigslist, an HP Pavilion N5415.
Obviously a junker compared to contemporary standards, but I have to go out of my way to say that machine is not a pleasure to use.
It took me an entire evening to re-install the damn thing and get it to “normal” and as a person in my early thirties who’s been using computers since he was 5, that was a complete waste of my time. I’d gladly pay money to get that time back.
XP, Never again.
On a positive note, I can now test XRNS-SF at home and it’s looking good! I’m jealous it’s not on OS X. I need to learn OBJ-C and do it in OS X someday. A great learning project for me, I hope?
Also, when I have some free time I’ll do a Linux partition for good measure for even more sadomasochism.
Normal = deleting the previous user’s partitions, installing all the OS (manufacturer disks), un-installing the 3rd party crap provided by the manufacturer alongside the OS, reboots to do so, patches, more reboots, updates, did i mention reboots?, java, and avast firewall.
A whole fucking night?!
In Steve Handjob’s world I put in a DVD, walk away, come back, click software update, (while I use the computer), and I’m done.
Anyway, just a rant. I can’t believe people put up with this shit.
If you pay for old hardware, it is branded for Linux only usually.
But also for the more bloated Linux editions you need 512MB memory at least.
(unless you want to install Damn Small Linux)
Windows XP on a laptop:Windows XP without any servicepack will do fine and fast, but you get into troubles with a lot of software that requires .NET 1.1 or higher which again requires SP1 or SP2 minimum.
Honestly, Windows XP build 2600.0 (is i believe before SP1 which was build 2600.1106) is the fastest XP version around.
Yet has all these security issues and no firewall.
This XP machine is a 900 MHZ AMD Duron so technically it’s faster than my iBook G4 800Mhz (my other mac, not mentioned in my sig). So, manufactured around the same time period.
Both are painful because of the slow speed, but the experience of getting both machines up and running are vastly different.
I’m sure if I had a ghost image like back in my Windows 2000 days it would be smooth but that is beside the point. I’m not some guy deploying a thousand machines in a corporate environment, I’m one guy who needed to re-install a system with the manufacturer provided tools. (salt in the wound, I had to clone the 3 HP cds into 3 CDRs because it was complaining that they were corrupted. the fact that i could clone them (on my OSX machine, of course) and fool HP negates that stupidity)
I’m sure the version of mac os on your iBook G4 is older than XP.
I remember my first computer… it was a Pentium 3 800mhz with Win98 (yes, I’m young) and I remember running Xp on it… it barely works… these 800mhz are made to use win98… not xp… so I guess the version you run on your iBook is an old mac OS, am I right?
my first computer was an Atari 800XL, i even still have it, painted a silver rainbow on it too. too bad i don’t have the cables and wires, but i do still have the giant floppy drive the five and a quarter inch Disk Drive!
