You are welcome. I will be staying away from Win 8 as long as I can.

 

I hate technology, period. I'm a cranky old man that happens to be growing up in the "information age." All computers and their OS's suck haha. Apples cost twice what they should, and PCs disintegrate (last PC lasted a wonderful *3* years until its hard drive was declared to be on life support last week)

 

I build my own. I have 4 computers on a KVM switch here - 2 I built myself and 2 came out of the trash heap needing relatively minor repairs (new power supplies fixed them both). One each Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 7, and Linux.

 

I do pretty much the same, the only ones I don't build are my laptops, frankly because it'd probably be a major pain. I'm still running two xp machines, one windows 7, and then a linux one. The linux one is really starting to grow on me with the way new operating systems are turning out.

 

Laptops are buildable if you buy a knockdown kit - but why bother?

 

Portability for class and around the house, so I can do my work on the porch when it's nice out.

Which Linux are you running glc?

 

No, I meant why bother building a laptop - just buy one ready to go.

Right now, I'm running Linux Mint LXDE 11. It's an old box - Dell Dimension 4550 with a P4 and 1 gig ram. It's one of the trash heap machines.

 

Oh yea, I definitely don't see the point to building one. And how do you like mint with the specs of that machine? I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 right now but my machine seems to struggle to keep up with it sometimes.

 

I'm on my iPhone 5 more than anything. But ya, I custom build towers as well. You can buy a really nice laptop for $400 here. Wipe out win 8 and roll.

 

I have the LXDE version of Mint and it's actually quite snappy. However, it's out of support and Mint has discontinued LXDE. What are the specs of your machine? You may want to look at Lubuntu, it uses LXDE. I'm probably going to install Lubuntu 13.04 when it comes out of beta. The "L" in LXDE stands for "Lightweight" and is a desktop for old/weak machines. The only reason I even want a desktop at all is I don't enjoy using a command line. If I didn't want a desktop I'd install Slackware, that's for true Linux geeks.

Assuming you can get drivers for Win 7 or whatever you want to put on it instead.

Staples has a bunch of refurb Lenovos with Win 7 pretty cheap. I just sent a friend over there yesterday to get one, his old Acer took a crap and isn't worth fixing.

 

It's an old acer notebook, off the top of my head I wanna say it has 1 gig of ram, 1.6ghz processor, a 320 gig hdd, no battery (have to keep it plugged in all the time), and some of the keys and the trackpad doesn't work (I just plug in my own mouse and keyboard). Got it off a friend pretty cheap to learn linux on since it wasn't worth fixing and he needed something he could carry to class. I'll definitely take a look into Lubuntu, another one of friends told me to try Xubuntu, any opinions of that distribution?

 

Xubuntu has the xfce desktop, which is lightweight but not as light as LXDE.

 

It seems MS may change back to boot to desktop on Win 8. Seems nobody likes how it is now.

http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-wind...op-7000014075/

 

Good article. However, instead of calling it Windows 8.1, they should just call it Windows 9. M$ has a track record of alternating good operating systems with turkeys - 98SE, good - ME, terrible - XP, good - Vista, awful - 7, good - 8, awful in quite a few people's opinion. XP was a major architecture change (bringing in the NT/2000 architecture which was designed for business) but 7 was just a "fixed" Vista, so why not have 9 be a "fixed" 8?

Windows 9 should be offered in 2 editions - touch screen and non-touch screen versions.

 

Shoot, the desktop I built back in the day is still running strong with 2000 pro.

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