If you have read my ramblings on this site, you’ll know that this sort of time last year I gave up with Microsoft Windows and embraced the powers of Ubuntu Linux.
This all came about because the computer that was running XP was full of run time errors and as slow as a snail, not having a copy of XP to do a reinstall and refusing to spend £25 upwards to get a copy, instead I bought a more up to date PC with no operating system and installed Ubuntu.
Up until recently the old PC has been sat idle collecting dust. I’ve now given it a new lease of life by wiping the old XP off of it and installing Linux Puppy. This is a very small operating system that runs in Ram, so is amazingly fast and light on resources.
But small doesn’t mean it lacks functionality. The programs installed with it allow you to do everything you’d want to do with a Windows machine, from word processing to image, video and audio editing, it’s all there in a small package.
There’s loads of different versions of Puppy depending on how old your PC is, there are versions that will bring old 486 and early Pentium PC’s back from the grave. This is not it’s sole purpose though. Puppy can be booted from a memory stick and used on any computer, as long as the BIOS allows USB booting of course, so you can carry your own personal operating system around with you and use it without affecting the host computer.
The PC I did the full install on isn’t able to boot from USB and so uses all the hard drive.
It’s nice to see the old girl being useful again and as fast as it was when bought new 12 years ago. Can’t ever remember having so much functionality and still have 33gig of hard drive left using Windows.
