Civilme:
I ran a test today that may be of interest. I'm in the process of
assembling a second computer ("Lazarus") from some old stuff that I've
accumulated; eventually, it is to be a server for a home network. Right
now, Lazarus consists of:
TMC Socket 7 motherboard
AMD K6-2-500 CPU
128 mb RAM
Maxtor 15 gb HD
Trident 975 based video card
Creative CD-ROM
Logitech wheelmouse on PS/2 port
Generic floppy and keyboard
NO printer, modem, sound card
The test consisted of doing default installations of Win98SE and LM 8.0,
and comparing the elasped time between booting the installation CD and
logging in. The results were as follows:
Win98SE: 0:27
LM 8.0: 0:24
I then deleted the Mandrake installation, and re-installed it, but this
time I chose expert, server partitioning, and selected ALL of the
packages. Total time: 0:39.
Note that the Windows installation time does not include the time for
partitioning and formatting the hard drive (0:28 with Partition Magic),
nor the time to load the graphics and VIA drivers. It does, however,
include the time to feed my old Win 3.1 floppies to prove that I was
entitled to do an upgrade. Of course, with Mandrake, the disk operations
are included in the installation time, and neither drivers nor 7 year
old disks were necessary. OTOH, Windows really shuts down in a hurry if
there's nothing else installed!
Regards,
Carroll
civileme wrote:
>
> A friend of one of the folks here is finishing a Ph.D. in
> mathematics. He uses an IBM laptop and he was running mandrake
> 7.1. Recently, he installed 8.0. It didn't like his mouse, so
> he used an alternate image and installed kernel 2.2.19 and set
> up that one in the bootloader. His total time to install was
> 1.5 hours.
>
> Now to keep someone else happy, he had to install PowerPoint on
> the same laptop.
>
> He tried the Win98 restoration disk. It was missing so many
> drivers that he despaired of ever finding them all.
>
> He bought windows ME. The CD wasn't bootable. He restored 98
> and tried to use it to start the ME disk. The program told him
> that this was a CD for computers without windows and that he
> needed to buy the upgrade edition.
>
> He tried Windows NT. He had to seek professional advice (from
> the staff of a linux company because Microsoft wasn't helping)
> to get it installed. Then he discovered drivers simply were NOT
> available for some of the features he needed to run power point.
>
> He tried ME again, this time generating the famous 98 boot disk
> that is the closest thing to a swiss army knife Microsoft ever
> produced, Well, stage one--he couldn't format the partition.
>
> He booted into linux and fired up disk drake and took care of
> that ornery partition, even formatting it.
>
> WindowsME install program upchucked saying some nonsense about
> 64K clusters which it did not support.
>
> OK NOW the windows98 boot disk could format the partition. 4K
> clusters were verified.
>
> And ME still complained about 64K clusters and shut down.
>
> So, with 4 days and the purchases of two systems wasted, he is
> using Konqueror on the web to track down Microsoft Win98 drivers
> for his notebook. Then he will finally be able to load
> PowerPoint, we hope, unless it wants to see a different version
> of Windows, like XP.
>
> I am beginning to believe that if I took someone completely
> ignorant of computers, then he could install linux and have a
> fully functioning system a lot sooner than with windows.
