Foreign Perspectives

For me Vista was the final straw that decided me upon dumping Windows at the earliest opportunity. Never before had I seen such a poorly tested system.

That was a couple of years ago but moving out of Windows wasn’t possible for me then as I’d heaps of mail in Outlook which I wanted to take with me. Now it’s different though as the mail import facilities available in the Ubuntu mail programs have come on considerably so at the moment I’m in the process of cutting down the size of the PST below the 1GB import limit which seems the final barrier. Still, it’s on the home run so later today I should have everything moved into Ubuntu.

Aside from the email the move has been incredibly easy to do. Backing up everything in Vista and restoring it all in Ubuntu worked just fine. The only preparation required for that was making sure not to use the Office 2007 file formats though even that’s not really a requirement these days as OpenOffice can read those just fine.

What’s the benefit of the move though? Well, the Vista computer was quite simply becoming unuseably slow thanks to all the junk that’s associated with Vista. One notable improvement that I did make on Vista was disabling the “indexing” facility. That’s there simply to speed up searching for text within the files on your computer. Sounds like a useful facility, doesn’t it? How many times have you ever used it? For me, it’s at best once every couple of years yet enabling indexing has a major impact on the day to day speed of your computer (it’s the reason why your disk is in almost constant use even when you’re not doing anything). Even disabling it takes hours though as it needs to switch off indexing on every file on your computer which probably means hundreds of thousands of files these days for almost everyone.

The other major benefit is that Ubuntu is smaller. A lot smaller. It runs just fine on the netbook computer with 512MB which isn’t an option for Vista. That smaller size means that it runs a whole lot faster. Running SkyPE works great on the Acer 751 in Ubuntu; the same computer can’t deal with video when running Vista. It takes a lot less discspace too. The basic Windows 7 installation needs about 25GB, the basic Ubuntu installation needs less than 10GB. That’s not comparing like with like either as the Ubuntu install includes a fully working Office installation.