New laptop

[johnridley]

I did a little comparison work last night and we wound up going over to Office Depot to pick up a Toshiba laptop for L. It seems pretty nice from a hardware perspective. L says she'd just as soon leave Vista on it for now, and I can't really argue, she has some experience with it from school and she'll need to work with it to some extent for the next few years, and I'm sure it'll work well enough. We can always go back to XP if we need to.

It is a total slug though. It's amazing that you can take a dual-core 2.16 GHz machine with 3GB of RAM and make it take 4 minutes to shut down on a fresh install with no software running. It's very pretty, but slow as anything.

Out of the box I booted to PING and plugged in a USB hard drive and made a virgin drive image. I uninstalled a bunch of their cruft, like the Office trial version, the Norton 360, Netzero install, etc. And then I had to repartition (using GPartEd) because they set it up as one big 250G partition (minus recovery volumes). The thing already had about 20GB used on the boot drive, so I made the final boot size 50G.

Tonight we'll install OpenOffice and Firefox and she can get busy moving her stuff from the old machine.

Comments

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

I have a constant fight with the household PCs that run XP on the subject of slow startup. Augean stables.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

XP can start up slow. Heck, BSD would start up slow if it was crammed with all the sludge that some Windows installs have in them.

My XP machines are up and ready to go in about 50 seconds generally, and shut down in about 30. But I don't let any crap on them, in fact I don't even run antivirus. AV software really, REALLY slows down startup. But I do run it anyway on machines that the kids touch.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

No AV? Wow. How do you manage that with all of the crapola out there?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I don't do stupid things. Problem solved.

I've been running Windows since 3.1, and the only time I've EVER had a virus on my machine was when I intentionally introduced one to see if the AV software was working.

The family PC has gotten malware on it from time to time; it's hard to keep the kids from clicking on free crap.

I do have AV software loaded, but as of about a year ago I got sick of the constant drain on the system. Now I just run a manual scan every few weeks.

[jennlk]

I don't run any active AV, and the kids share my system. I've got AVG doing a daily scan, and run AdAware once a week. I update the OS as necessary, and don't run IE or Outlook.

The first malware I've gotten since we installed the new machine (two years ago? at least), was just last weekend when the 11yo gave me Internet AntiVirus Pro, between the time that he got up and when I got into the computer room.

L's computer gets more stuff than the other systems combined, but she's also a lot more trusting than we are.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yes, she'll definitely have AVG installed shortly.