New computer
August 1, 2008I have a new computer. My dad and I switched machines, since his was way overpowered compared to mine. It’s an Asus Terminator 2 Deluxe, packing an Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with hyperthreading, 2GB of DDR-RAM, and my own GeForce 6200 128MB DDR-RAM.
My dad had been running Windows 2000 on it for years now (with 512MB of RAM and the on-board video cad), and it was clear Windows 2000 was holding the machine down. It absolutely FLIES with Vista on it, in any case.
I’m quite happy. It’s also a lot quieter than I’m used to. Sassy.
Windows 2000 was a fairly good release in its day. Its performance was a bit behind Windows 98SE, but the reliability was far better.
For some reason, the overall performance just didn’t seem to scale with faster hardware. I’ve run it on a machine with 1gig of RAM and a fairly modern HD and yet it still seemed slow. Given the age of the OS, it’s a bit of mystery why it runs noticeably slower than a recent Ubuntu on the same hardware. Weird.
That and the font rendering on small fonts sucks ass.
Comment by Michael Reed — August 2, 2008 @ 3:22 am
I have Win2k installed on a Compaq Deskpro 1GHz. I think it’s fairly fast on that machine; in fact the only thing I’ve seen on it that’s faster is BeOS. Fedora 9 is painfully slow, and Slackware 12 is better but not by that much. The latest Ubuntu won’t even install. Of course, I’d probably get better performance all around with a RAM and video upgrade; it’s got 256MB RAM and the onboard video is Intel i815. I may soon bump it to 512MB and an older GeForce 4 card and see how it stacks up then.
Comment by Morgan — August 3, 2008 @ 6:22 pm
Morgan,
This is my point. Upgrade the hardware and you might be surprised how little gain there is.
Perhaps I’m doing something wrong and your experience will be different?
Comment by Michael Reed — August 4, 2008 @ 10:36 pm