Purely Technology

Choosing your OS on your netbook is pretty important although they all do pretty much the same thing.

I just wanted to share with you our recent experience with netbooks though as a word of caution.  Ours came pre-installed with Ubuntu from Dell – 8.04 NBR (netbook re-mix) which was ok for a couple of months until it stopped updating itself and no matter what we couldn’t get it to install any more updates.  So we bit the bullet and installed 9.04 NBR.  Which was straight forward and cured the problem of updating.  Some in the office were unhappy though with the difference between Ubuntu and Windows so we decided to put XP on instead.

At this point its worth noting that for speed we opted for an 8gb SSD hard drive rather than default 160gb SATA.  Which effectively ruled out installing Windows 7 Starter as you need 16gb HD space….

Installing Windows XP in the end was easy as long as we prepared a USB stick using a copy of XP and a programme called “WintoFlash” by Novicorp.  Once done booted up the USB on the netbook and the install was pretty quick.  Then came the pain.  On day one we installed 135 updates for Windows alone which given the lack of processing oomph took a good six hours.  Day two brought another 59 updates!  This time we had service packs, Windows Media Player and so forth.  So at the end of day two we had a full HD even though all previous documents, pictures etc… had been moved to an external SD card in the side of the netbook.  We hadn’t installed a single programme and we had 141mb left which was so little there wasn’t even enough room to act as a buffer while we tried to install Lotus Symphony 3 beta 2 on the external SD card…

So we had to go back to Ubuntu – I was personally willing to try something a little more left field such as Moblin or CrunchBang but there was a certain amount of familiarity to Ubuntu for other in the office so I stuck to Ubuntu.

Anyway, using another Ubuntu install on the office laptop I created a USB start up disk on a USB flash drive (5 minutes) and then installed Ubutnu and ran all the updates in another 15 minutes.  So twenty minutes roughly start to finish, with a whole host of additional software such as the whole of Open Office 3.1 and there was 4.4gb spare on the HD.

So our advice for a netbook OS? Linux all the way.  Smaller, faster, lighter on resources and most of all FREE!  And also infinitely more secure as 99% of viruses and malware are written to exploit Windows…