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To Ubuntu or not to Ubuntu; that is the question.
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BaronJ:
Hi Gary,
Its nice to hear that you got things up and running with Linux Mint.

The log of how and why you did it, is exactly how it should be.  Many people forget to take backups, particularly when making major changes to their machines.  One of the reasons for a dedicated "Home" partition is so that you can change to another flavour of Linux if you wish whilst keeping your data safe and usable.  Depending upon how much ram you have you may find that the "Swap" partition does not get used at all.

I have 1Gb ram and no swap usage at all.  My HDD is 160Gb and I'm using a 3GHz P4 CPU.  So not a race horse by today's standards.

 
garym:
Hi Baron,

I probably should have added that I have a Win 7 laptop as well, which is handy for looking up solutions to problems if anything goes wrong.

If the desktop system had been messed up by the install I could, as a last resort have re-installed everything from scratch as I built it from parts and installed XP from disks. The machine has 2GB RAM and a Core 2 Duo cpu (E7500 I think).

I've since managed to install a networked printer, which meant using the Terminal. This was a bit of a learning curve, like going back to DOS. I'm not sure if I did it correctly but it printed a test page.

Also installed the Chromium web browser as I use Chrome in Windows.

Gary
AdeV:
My last home XP machine was an old Dell laptop, a 610 IIRC, with either 1/2 or 1GB of memory, 250GB HDD and a 2.something GHz CPU. Or maybe 1.something, I forget now.

As an XP machine, it was suffering. I use it primarily for surfing while watching the TV, or downloading stuff to watch on TV. It's connected wirelessly to a router about 6 feet away. Despite this, the wireless connection needed repairing anything from daily to monthly; the machine absolutely ground to a halt if one tried to do any kind of multitasking. e.g. copying a 5-6GB file out to a USB hard drive, would take 5 or so minutes if you sat and watched it, or up to several hours if you tried to surf at the same time. Just awful.

Last week I finally saw my arse with it for the last time & threw Mint MATE version 13 (Maya) onto it. What a transformation, I can multitask again, the USB transfer times are steady no matter what else I do. OK, it still won't play 1080p video full screen, but that's just because the machine isn't up to it... and since my favourite browser is Opera, I can carry on with a near-identical setup to what I had before.

So, for the older machine, especially one that's wheezing badly on XP, Mint is definitely the way forward.  :thumbup:
garym:
If anyone is having trouble with their wi-fi then a program called Inssider is quite useful. It displays the competing wi-fi signals that your computer can see. By moving to a different channel you can sometimes improve your wireless connection significantly. It is easy to install and use. I found that my next door neighbour was on the same channel as me and with a stronger signal as they had their router in the lounge whereas mine is under the stairs (I'll tell you why some other time). It seemed to be a particular problem for tablet computers, with frequent dropped connections. After changing to a different channel the connectivity is much better. I know some routers pick a channel automatically but theirs was always on 11. Anyway if you're interested the free version can still be downloaded from here.

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5936-inssider.html

Their official site http://www.inssider.comonly lists the paid for version now.

Gary
DavidA:
Gary,

Once you had your machine running on Linux,  what did you have to do to make the connection to the internet ?

Dave.
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