[BASSMASTER]

I have an old HP Pavillion that originally had Windows 98 on it, Pentium II, 64MB or RAM. There was very little software on on it, no spyware, viruses at all, and it ran Windows beautifully.

So first I put Ubuntu on it, what a mistake. Then I figured maybe it was Ubuntu, so I put Red Hat on it. Both of the OS's run terribly on this machine. Literally taking 4-5 minutes to open up a .doc document. 2-3 minutes just to open up an applett.

So my question is, is Windows that much better than these free OS's or do they just take some tweaking that I don't know about?

[fitzjj]

If you want to run a GUI with linux you will need more RAM than that. i ran RedHat 7.2 reasonably on a similar machine, but again more RAM would have been nicer. If you dont need a GUI then you will have no problems with any of the Linux OS' mentioned - or any that i know of.

As far as windows goes it is actually pretty good at running on low end machines - i also ran winXP on my PII with 64meg ram with no problems, ok i had to change some of the interface settings to increase performance but this is easily done through the control panel.

[Nitestick]

there are many other distros of linux. those two are resource hogs. yeah there are some tweaks but i can't really help you in that department. it would probably help if you got some more ram. you are also comparing current linux distros to an "obsolete" version of windows. depends on what you mean by better though. if you mean about as secure as a warehouse with an open door and a neon sign that says rob me sure windows is better. if you mean dodgy hardware detection, high software costs and a source code you won't get access to even for a billion dollars yeah. linux is superior to windows, windows is just convenient and user friendly now that came out like a burn but its not, its just me trying to push my point

[office politics]

win 98 memory managment blows. you'll prolly run into memory leaks and resource issues.

[Nitestick]

also be helpful if you were more specific about the pII, they range from 233mhz-450mhz and a fair way in performance.

[Tro1086]

Originally posted by csamuels
win 98 memory managment blows. you'll prolly run into memory leaks and resource issues.

Windows 98 memory managment cant be THAT bad. I used to run 98 on a Pentium 166Mhz with 32Mb of RAM perfectly on that machine. Win 98 rules on old machines. Barely uses any resources.

[Nitestick]

linux mini-distros rule on old machines if you've ever tried them. they'll blow 98 out of the water. don't get me wrong i love the plain old reliable 98se

[BASSMASTER]

Originally posted by nitestick
linux mini-distros rule on old machines if you've ever tried them. they'll blow 98 out of the water. don't get me wrong i love the plain old reliable 98se

any in particular you like?

[office politics]

Originally posted by Tro1086
Windows 98 memory managment cant be THAT bad. I used to run 98 on a Pentium 166Mhz with 32Mb of RAM perfectly on that machine. Win 98 rules on old machines. Barely uses any resources.

prolyy cus you weren't do crap with the machine.

up to about a year ago, my company used 98. I would constantly get calls about random wierd ****. First thing i would do is check the pc's sys properties for how much system resources were available. if under 10 %, reboot. problem solved.

i did research on the problem and found out that there's two different resource heaps that a 98 box uses, GDI and user. Also, no matter how much memory i put into the machine, the heaps stay at their same limits.

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[Law]

You could boost the Linux OS a little by creating a swap partition