A bit of techie self indulgence
No politics tonight and something to bore the pants off those of a non-techie nature, however there is a bit of a moral to the tale so bear with me.
Mrs Penguin‘s laptop is a bit knackered of late. To be fair it’s a Pentium 3 with only 128Mb of ram and slowly struggling along with Windows XP. It also had a rather unfortunate encounter with a pint of coke and I mean a whole pint about 6 months ago.
Now a new laptop is not financially an option at the moment but I thought I’d indulge myself and have a bit of a shop around the main vendors. What struck me the most was that all new computers now seem to come with Microsoft’s new Vista operating system which I really don’t like. Admittedly Dell are doing machines with XP but you’re going to have to pay an extra
22nd May 2007 in Techie Stuff
tyger responded on 23 May 2007 at 4:03 pm #
Being
Political Penguin responded on 23 May 2007 at 11:21 pm #
Hi Tyger. The spec of the processor probably isn’t that important. I get the same performance with multi-tasking out of my other box-standard Celeron that only runs at 1Ghz. Given that level of performance for such an old chipset, what you could potentially do on your machine is mind-blowing.
If however the ‘not wanting to give up’ thing is an issue. You might want to check out ‘wine’ (the programe, not the alcoholic beverage sort) or ‘Crossover’ which is built on wine but sadly isn’t free. These port win32 executable files to Linux and effectively run a Windows system as a separate window within Linux making it possible to run Windows programmes/games on a Linux machine. However it’s not perfect and haven’t tried it myself given that I’m happy with what I can run as alternatives to Windows programmes.
tyger responded on 24 May 2007 at 9:30 am #
Oh no, I’m not welching on Linux. I have even checked how to run HL2 on Linux. It’s just that I want to play it through one last time!
I have been without even my XP PC (due to the corrupted HD) for so long, that I have been dying to play a decent FPS, something, sadly, the Wii is short of. My brother-in-law is putting pressure on me to get an XBOX 360, but funds do not stretch to such indulgence. And I
Sunny responded on 26 May 2007 at 8:08 pm #
Why not wipe your laptop and install Windows 98 SE on it? Easily available from Bit torrent etc…. and it’s still good for most things.
Political Penguin responded on 27 May 2007 at 12:03 pm #
Sorry for the absence, been busy doing distinctly non-internet related things the last week. Tyger, wasn’t thinking you were welshing at all just suggesting an idea. There’s also something else called Win2Lin or something like that but again it’s not free but that might also do the job. Good luck with the Linux install, any problems drop us a line.
To Sunny, on the laptop front things have moved on a bit. Mrs Penguin being the despicable thief that she is, has nicked my Windows/Linux desktop so I’ve inherited the laptop. After an evening of stripping it down and manually cleaning up the registry it actually runs fairly well now. It’s probably still up for a Linux install at some point in the future which probably answers your idea about Windows 98 SE. If you’re a regular reader you’ll probably have caught on to my absolute hatred of all things Microsoft. To be fair to them XP is probably the best GUI operating system they’ve ever produced, which isn’t saying much but the thought of going back to 98 fill me with dread. I’ve spent far too much of my time in the past sorting out those machines, really would not wish to revisit that.