lucky13
Group: Members
Posts: 1478
Joined: Feb. 2007 |
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Posted: April 21 2008,00:41 |
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This is going a little off topic but I think reducing bloat is worthy of discussing even when it applies to other operating systems...
| Quote | | i can navigate the web, check my mail, and get homework done faster than i could with my other computer when i was running vista with an intel pentium dual @1.46 ghz and 1GB ram |
You just need to learn how to set up Vista for better performance. When you have time, use Google to look up 'vista speed hacks' and you'll find plenty of tips for better performance. Most of them start with disabling Aero features (choose Vista Basic or Vista Standard), which really shouldn't be that bad on dual anything with RAM measured in GB.
I'm running Vista on a single core 1.4 ghz box with 768MB RAM (and video card with 512 MB RAM) just fine -- but I don't run any special effects, pretty spartan. Last person who asked me to check out a Vista laptop because it was running "slow" and draining her battery had a big fancy high-res 1.25 GB wallpaper and all kinds of special effects running. I scaled the wallpaper and turned off some effects and everything was okay again.
Many cases of "poor" performance are related to video-related bloat -- big fancy graphics, high resolution icons, etc. That's affected me using supposed low resource-oriented distros like Vector more than in Vista (one setting to manage in Vista versus editing menus to remove icons in Vector). YMMV. At least DSL lives up to the billing by keeping substance above style -- great for people who wanna get stuff done, maybe not so great for people more interested in eye candy.
Speaking of which, if you can live with screen blanking and not the intensive graphics of xscreensaver, I submitted slock to testing a couple months ago. It blanks the screen -- not fancy, but it works. You type your password (set one if you haven't already) without any console feedback; if it's good you resume X, if you fail it beeps and you're locked out. Neither xscreensaver nor slock is a security feature -- ctrl-alt-backspace kills X and takes you to console. Then it's just a matter of "startx" and anyone has access to your X session (dittos for full control of the system in the console since dsl has full root privileges via sudo without any need for password -- something I always change on hard drive installs).
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"It felt kind of like having a pitbull terrier on my rear end."
-- meo (copyright(c)2008, all rights reserved)
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