Bye bye Vista, say hello to Ubuntu!

I've bought a new laptop about 5 months ago - a HP Pavilion tx 1000

The hardware of this machine is based on 2Gb of RAM and a AMD Turion 64 x2.

I liked this laptop mostly because it was small sized, came with two spear batteries, has a touch screen and remote control all bundled inside in a nice looking laptop machine running Windows Vista.

The only big disappointment from using this machine was the very poor performance when compared back to my older laptop (a 1Gb of RAM Intel Dual Core machine).

The laptop took forever to boot and using it on everyday tasks was a pain to say the least, especially when I compare back to the other laptop of mine (that is still fully functional) and it will open several work windows, copy files and run programs so much faster than the brand new HP.

The reason?

Vista.

This newish OS is consuming 1Gb alone worth of RAM resources and for the sake of efficiency HP decided to install the x86 version of Vista instead of taking advantage of the native architecture.

Worst still as everything is slow inside Vista and I've endured through these limitations to prove myself that this was "normal" on a new OS but enough is enough.

Decided to backup my documents partition to an external USB HDD and launched the Ubuntu 8.04 x64 edition.

---

Installed like a breeze in less than 20 minutes, I decided to use the full disk since I want no more acquaintance with Vista on my work machine and I said hello to my new work environment.

Sounds works, Graphic drivers were downloaded automatically and I was ready to go in a snap.

One of my biggest surprises was noticing the new speed of my hardware.

It's booting dang fast and looking on the resources monitor I see that having firefox and many other windows open with the default eye-candy installed on gnome uses around 500Mb of RAM.

For the first time I can actually see both the processors on this machine working seamlessly together and taking advantage of this dual core feature. Needless to say that I'm really happy since this is the sort of environment more suited to work with virtual machines without delays.

It was about time to make this change, ubuntu is free so I won't be bothered to spend any money on licenses and can still run my work OS specific programs comfortably inside Virtual machines.

Now I'll surely be trying to learn more and enjoy my laptop.

:)

-- Nuno Brito