Lightweight Windows and Linux for low-end machines
ONE OF MY INTERESTS is in recycling and reusing older computers. If a business has a room full of fairly recently-pensioned-off kit, I point them at
ComputerAid, but it wants recent kit, preferably by the van-full, not the odd knackered-old one-off. I regularly take such doorstops that clients are discarding, upgrade them with some marginally newer bits, put a lightweight OS and apps on them and give them to impoverished - or just tightwad - mates. With the right choice of software, even a five-year-old computer can be a fast, responsive machine with bags of life left in it.
For example, if they know enough to want Windows, I generally advocate Windows 2000 as a good version. It dates from seven years ago, but it's still perfectly usable if, post-install, you're prepared to spend a full day installing updates, patches and new applications. Why? Because it has vastly less cruft and useless tat in it than XP, so it's faster. Compared to Vista, it's about an order of magnitude smaller and more efficient. Windows is Windows: so long as you're in the same family (in this case, 32-bit NT with support for Plug&Play), they're largely functionally equivalent.
You can update Win2K Pro with a firewall, antivirus, antispyware, current Internet client software and media handling tools and a modern office suite and some productivity tools, all for free, and have a version of Windows that looks like, works like and is entirely compatible with more recent versions. It will network with them, game with them, exchange files with them, and in the majority of cases, run their applications and games and even drivers absolutely fine. Just because something says "requires Windows XP" on the box, it often doesn't - I've had many "XP-only" products, from printers to TV tuners to games, working absolutely perfectly on W2K. The only way to find out is to try, though.
And, of course, because it's old, licences are cheap and easy to come by. An old office machine usually comes with one.
On notebooks, things are slightly different, as XP boots much faster than W2K and is dramatically quicker (and rather more reliable) at suspending, hibernating and resuming. The question with XP on older machines becomes how much of the cruft can you turn off, disable or uninstall - or better still, not install in the first place.
If you want to know about these free tools, watch out for a short series of articles to follow this one, telling you what they are, where to find them, what if any restrictions apply to their use and why you should give them a try.
What's cheaper than cheap? Free
For people with little to no computer experience - or no spare cash at all - these days I recommend Linux. For novices, it's as easy to use as Windows - indeed, it looks and works in much the same way - but they're safe from all the nasties out there. (If they've got some money but not a great deal, a few-year-old used Mac makes a great home computer, but you need to find one with a recent version of OS X and Microsoft Office, because they cost Real Money.)
For the poor sod setting the thing up, Linux is quicker and easier to install than Windows. It usually comes with a whole suite of applications all pre-installed, whereas with Windows, you have to go and find your own, download them and put them on, one by one, by hand. With a non-commercial distro such as Ubuntu, you do tend to have to load up drivers for various restricted media formats such as MP3, Flash, and so on, but that's quickly and easily done. You don't need to burden down an older, slower an old PC with anti-malware defenses, because there are no Linux viruses out there. This isn't simply because Linux is relatively obscure - it's because Linux is Unix, and like any Unix, it has a properly conceived and designed security model, tried and tested over nearly 40 years. Internet client programs don't download raw executables from remote machines - you don't even do this to install new programs - and when programs run, they do so with restricted privileges by default, so that they can't take over the system and wreak havoc. (As usual, I'll probably get loads of emails telling me that the sole reason that Windows has malware problems is that everyone runs Windows. Save your effort, unless you can demonstrate it. A time machine might prove handy for this.)
With really old, low-powered machines, though, the problem becomes what version of Linux to run. Current versions are designed for modern computers and have broadly the same system requirements as Windows XP: a gigahertz-odd CPU, half a gig of RAM, tens of gigs of disk space and a big screen.
The obvious answer would seem to be that if a seven-year-old version of Windows is still fine, use a seven-year-old copy of Linux - but in the world of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), things are very different.
Unlike commercial packages, updated every few years with a shiny box listing the new features, there are few formal "release cycles" for FOSS. Code undergoes continual review and improvement. "Release early, release often" is the mantra. Every so often, distribution vendors take a snapshot of what is currently out there, bundle it up onto media, test it all works together and release the result as a version of a distribution. Ubuntu releases every six months; other companies and projects are less frequent or regular, but a new release every year is pretty normal.
Sometimes, people ask "why should I get the new version?" They want to know what the new features are. The trouble is that there's no simple answer. Every release of a Linux distro is substantially changed. Pretty much every single program file in every package will have changed, generally for the better. Bugs are removed, features are added, crufty bits are optimised, UI glitches are smoothed over. Buyers of commercial software packages will be disappointed by the absence of big, flashy new features. FOSS isn't like that. It's a process of gradual, continual, incremental change - almost always improvements and refinements. Sometimes, alas, support for older devices disappears: stuff from the age of ISA and even 16-bit PCMCIA is declining, for example.
But FOSS ages faster, because it changes quicker. A copy of Linux from two years ago is vintage software; when it's four years old, it's an antique, completely superseded by its descendants. This isn't a world of new boxed products every now and then. It's a world of new releases every hour of every single day. A distribution version, like, say, Ubuntu 6.10, is a snapshot of the world as it was 9 months ago. And 9 months is 3/4 of a year: it's a long time, long enough to make a human.
Unless you need to maintain standard versions, say on mission-critical business systems, when you want stable, solid, slow-changing releases (like Ubuntu 6.06LTS or Redhat and SUSE's Enterprise Linuxes), you really should avoid outdated releases of FOSS.
Linear Mode
