Aethyr wrote:Roga Danar wrote:endured living under the bloated weight of XP.
Are you kidding me?
A clean windows XP installation idles at about 70 Mbs of RAM at worst, has a total footprint that counts in MBs (less than a GB) and can smoothly run on processors with less than 1 Ghz clock speed
Usually bloat comes from the user...
It's not fair in any way to compare a 10 year old system like XP to a 2011 system like Mint 11, but sure, bloated
Welcome to the forums. Enjoy your new green life ->
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Two key words you seem to have missed in my original post to this thread were “Noob” and “student”.
Notwithstanding, it is my opinion (so take it or leave at your leisure) that Windows XP doesn't give non-Jedi users like myself the ability to install the OS with any degree of control. To wit, a novice user can't do a 'minimal' install that just includes the services and features that he needs. Conversely, an advanced user can't perform a 'maximal' install with all of the specific bells and whistles he may need.
Whenever I did a 'clean install' of XP I always got a bunch of services running on my system that I didn't need or want and, no, my Kung Fu was never good enough to turn them off easily. So, you're right; my bloat was—in part—due to “the user”. Why anyone would find that laughable, however, escapes me. But, what the heck, I'll never begrudge a bloke for being easily amused...
I define “bloat” as software that is useless on my system. Because Microsoft designs Windows to be installed on millions of systems, with trillions (I'm guesstimating, obviously) of possible configurations, they include a lot of services and features by default that I, for one, would rather do without.
Obviously, your mileage my vary.
XP always ran horribly on my laptop. From the moment I did a clean install, it has always taken forever to start up and the system fan was always running, it has always frozen my system frequently, and it has always taken forever to shut down. Since I've had no similar problems with the Macs I've owned over the past 25 years, it may have been kind of knee-jerk of me to blame XP. Interestingly, XP runs just
great (no system freezes at all and very speedy) via vmware fusion on my (admittedly much more powerful) Mac. So, my assessment of XP may very well be an unfair one. XP's behavior on my laptop certainly may be due to the quirks of my particular laptop and my inability to deal with them effectively.
On the other hand, I've been a Windows user since 3.11. I remember how my 386 struggled with it until I upgraded my RAM to 4MB. Soon, I had buy a 486 box to achieve acceptable performance. When Win 95 was released, I had to move up to 16MB RAM plus a Pentium 90 to get anything done. Eventually, Win 98 was released and I had to bump up to 32MB RAM. When XP was released, I had to get at least a Pentium 500 and 256MB of RAM to to achieve acceptable performance. In my experience (and YMMV), Windows has always required the latest hardware or significant RAM upgrades to be usable at all, and this is why I have come to think of it as bloated.
Others Windows users may have had completely different experiences.
I also agree that it's unfair to compare a ten year-old OS to a brand new one. But, so what? I switched from XP to Mint this week. Of course I'm going to compare the two. I never said it was a fair comparison. I was merely excited that my system fan hasn't come on once since installing Mint, and the system hasn't frozen once since the switch. I'm able to actually use my laptop the way it was intended to be used. I'm thrilled and I wanted to share it with a few blokes who might have had a similar experience. That's all.
So, make no mistake, I'm not out to badmouth XP. I honestly don't have a dog in that fight. I was simply trying to share my new found enthusiasm for Mint.
Cheers!
R.D.
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