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Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a $248 Win8 PC.

Posted by Unknown on from the boosting-sales-numbers dept.

theodp writes "A little birdie told me which Windows 8 machines would sell out fast. 'Cheep' ones! While no official sales figures have emerged, anecdotal evidence suggests that cheap Windows 8 laptops were a big hit with Black Friday shoppers, leaving some Walmart and Best Buy bargain hunters disappointed at missing out on the sub-$250 deals. So, was the Doctor-Desktop-and-Mister-Metro dual nature of Windows 8 and lack of a touchscreen no big deal to these bargain basement 'Laptop Hunters', or did they not realize what they were buying? Or, as a GeekWire commenter suggests, perhaps they were really just looking to score an ultra-cheap Linux laptop!"

39 of 642 comments (clear)

  1. I can assure you... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They have no idea what they purchased, it was a cheap buy and they will be sorely disappointed when it runs like crap a year from now.

    1. Re:I can assure you... by deniable · · Score: 5, Insightful

      At that price, toss it a year from now and buy another.

    2. Re:I can assure you... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      it was a cheap buy and they will be sorely disappointed when it runs like crap a year from now.

      I know several people who bought very cheap netbooks and were very happy with them for a number of years. Heck, I still use my ageing eee 900 daily.

      Cheap doesn't mean bad or badly built. Not everyone needs a 64 processor monster to surf the web.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    3. Re:I can assure you... by wisty · · Score: 5, Funny

      What Moore giveth, HTML5 taketh away.

    4. Re:I can assure you... by symbolset · · Score: 5, Funny

      The phrase is: "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    5. Re:I can assure you... by mystikkman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not true since Vista. Slashdot is full of folks who've last used Windows more than 10 years ago and thus complain of things like bluescreens, bloat etc. which makes them look like idiots.

      Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.

    6. Re:I can assure you... by slim · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Every couple of years, my parents ask for help buying a laptop. I tell them to just go to a PC World-type shop and pick out one with a screen size they're comfortable with, that feels solid enough from a build quality perspective. They don't want to compile kernels or play Crysis; they want to run Word and a browser. So I know anything in the shop will do what they need for a couple of years at least.

    7. Re: I can assure you... by LordLimecat · · Score: 4, Informative

      For the last 4 years or so, the viruses have been exploiting browser plugins. That would be the collective faults of Sun, Oracle, and Adobe.

    8. Re: I can assure you... by bmo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Have you been surfing deviant porn sites again?

      Religious sites have been serving up malware more than porn sites now.

      Indeed, I belong to a financial site whose ads were serving up malware at one point. It wasn't them, but the ad service.

      Your point of view is outdated.

      --
      BMO

    9. Re: I can assure you... by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Informative

      You are using the wrong AV then, just use what I use at the shop and give to my customers which is Comodo Internet Security Free. Its lightweight, only uses 60Mb-90Mb depending on what features you use, has by default sandboxing, and while the defaults are logical and sane you can tweak to your heart's content so you only have what you want. For example i don't IM or use download mail so those features are turned off. Its really nice and its the only one that i know of that is free for personal AND business use,they make their money on the server products and web services.

      Of course anybody that got one of the BF laptops will have to clean off a Horton or mcCrappy infection, I call it an infection because frankly I've seen malware that uses less resources than those two, but once that crap is gone and a decent AV like Comodo or Avast Free (my former "go to" and still nice, just too chatty for my taste now) is put on? Well then even a netbook will purr like a kitten. Oh and i'm sure some will say "What about MSE? its super low resource!" yes it is but frankly it is really only good for geeks, as I've found that while it catches bugs in downloaded files just fine it sucks ass at drive bys. With something like Comodo or Avast you have MUCH better drive by protection as both do scan before load on web pages which MSE don't and this when combined with a low rights browser like any of the Chromium variants makes it pretty damned hard to infect Vista/7/8. In fact the last time I saw one of those pwned the user uninstalled his AV so he could install a "porn codec" which of course was just a trojan that filled the system with malware.

      Trust me, I have customers that can get more viruses than a Bangkok whore on coupon day and if Comodo can survive them without letting the machine get pwned? Then it'll work for anybody.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    10. Re:I can assure you... by Doctor_Jest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While Windows 7 was a vast improvement in many ways from the "open beta" that was Vista, Microsoft still has quite a few early design decisions that haunt them. I often wonder about how the Registry improves from release to release (it was a fairly crappy way of configuring the OS back in XP), but quite frankly the Registry itself is one of the things I loathe about Windows in the first place. But that's just me.

      But to say that MSFT can't write a good OS is just the height of arrogance, its elitist horseshit to make little nerds feel good about themselves

      What's funny is not that you bristle at the opinion, but that anyone's opinion that Microsoft can't do X or shouldn't do Y is somehow "elitist" horseshit. Sure the opinion was dripping with one poster's view of what makes a good OS, but the fact remains Microsoft has given us some massive turds in the history of Windows. The fact that they appear to have gotten it right with Windows 7 is not reinforced by the massive UI shift to leverage their Windows codebase into the smartphone market in Windows 8. And you agree with most of the rest of /. that the Metro UI is positively junk. It is showing the true nature of what a company searching for relevance in a changing technology climate can do, given enough money and micromanagement. (It could be any company, not just Microsoft...)

      What I cannot dismiss, and I do not believe is a fault of poor coding but more succinctly Microsoft's disdain for its customers, is the constant upheaval in Office file formats, phone home DRM, and an otherwise high regard for the *AA's built into the core OS in order to please them. I won't go into detail about that here, because it's been covered on /. umpteen times, but that nonsense alone has made me hate Microsoft at a basic level. Their culture, like Apple's, is one of contempt for the user's freedom to do what they wish with their purchased machine. The SecureBoot fiasco is just another in a long list of crimes. I say crimes, because frankly they were convicted of abusing monopoly power. That wasn't a witch hunt, like some contend. It was exposing the true nature of Microsoft, as reflected in their management. Rather like Jobs' personality and vision is reflected in Apple's walled garden and sealed computers (laptops in particular, but you can also point to the recent iMacs as another in a long line of removing freedom from the user...) I think we can both agree that Microsoft and Apple are one in the same when it comes to putting their goals of lock-in well above making good, solid OSes that get out of the way and let people be, well, people.

      --
      It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
    11. Re:I can assure you... by Drakonblayde · · Score: 5, Funny

      I tried, but since my hate machine is running Windows ME, Windows Update tells me to frak myself.

    12. Re:I can assure you... by symbolset · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But to say that MSFT can't write a good OS is just the height of arrogance, its elitist horseshit to make little nerds feel good about themselves by ignoring the fact that there are literally hundreds of millions of Windows installs out there and you know what? people are happy with them, it does what they want it to do.

      This is probably going to come off as rude, and for that I'm sorry. You say that Microsoft can write good software. Being a member of the community these last 30 years and skilled in the art, I would ask: "show me."

      I ain't seen it yet.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    13. Re:I can assure you... by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Best Buy offered a 15.6-inch Lenovo with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive for $187.99,"

      lemme tell you, those chromebooks have a lot of work ahead of them.. pc isn't dead at that pricing, far from it.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    14. Re:I can assure you... by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Informative

      It is still bloated, and it does still bluescreen. It's just that the "bluescreen" now reboots automatically instead of giving you useless error information, so it's an "improvement" of sorts. I would have made the error messages a bit more user friendly, or even rebooted the computer and then alerted the user as to why their computer rebooted... but hey, that would have been harder I guess. Windows 8 is the definition of bloated. It adds a ton of new features that make tablet use more appealing, but most people aren't running it on a tablet. Thus, you are carrying around all of this tablet crap when all you want to do is use your desktop/laptop.

      Stability is far, far better than it was in the 9x series of Windows, but I can't say it really has improved tremendously over 2000, though it does seem a bit less susceptible to flaky hardware. I actually like 7 - it was a shame what they did to it in 8.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    15. Re:I can assure you... by ozmanjusri · · Score: 5, Interesting

      At that price, toss it a year from now

      It'll be a race to the bottom for Win8 PC prices now. That's the only way they'll get them off the shelves.

      Windows 8 sales flounder as critics pan clumsy interface

      Windows 8 sales in Australia and overseas are below expectations, with one US expert describing its user interface as "a monster that terrorises poor office workers and strangles their productivity".

      http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/computers/windows-8-sales-flounder-as-critics-pan-clumsy-interface-20121126-2a2d0.html

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    16. Re:I can assure you... by DoraLives · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I beg to differ.

      I've been doing home computer repair for the general public for literal decades. I used to do it as a side job or for charity, but it's been my sole income for many years now. Bottom line: I've got a fair amount of experience working with equipment that's on the failing end of its life cycle, all of which has been entrusted to the tender mercies of your typical non-savvy user.

      And I'm a pattern recognizer, too.

      And nowadays the pattern is one of complete random events, for all classes of home computers.

      I've got people with ten year old eMachines running XP who's hardware continues to run without the slightest issue, and I've got people with brand-new three-thousand dollar specialty machines who can't catch a break, with bad motherboards, PSU's dying and taking other components out with them when they go, hard drive failures of every stripe and color, and on and on and on.

      I've decided that there's really no sensible difference in equipment anymore, so far as reliability goes.

      It all comes out of the same factory in China somewhere, and none of us really know what the hell is going on over on that end of the production cycle.

      It has become a crapshoot, plain and simple.

      Used to be, more expensive, "quality" computers could be expected to last longer, but no more.

      They're all using the same components from the same vendors, and if that's not enough, the batch-to-batch variabilities and imponderables are now completely impossible to keep effective or meaningful track of anymore.

      And what once was a clear pattern of "quality" goods giving a nice return on investment, has now become random noise.

      Nowadays any of it can fail for any reason at any time. May as well get the cheap stuff and try to cut your losses up front.

      --
      Is it fascism yet?
    17. Re:I can assure you... by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have a BSOD under W7 every other update on my main home machine, i.e. twice a month or so. Must be a driver of some sort, but still inexcusable. The machine runs perfectly fine with linux

      You probably have a piece of flaky hardware; Windows is NOT tolerant of flaky hardware. I've had two machines running dual-boot where Linux ran flawlessly but Windows bluescreened, one had a flaky power supply which eventually went out completely, the other was a bad mobo that I noticed some expoded capacitors on. It could be something as simple as a tiny bit of corrosion on a pin.

      --
      Free Martian Whores!
    18. Re:I can assure you... by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's not Microsoft's fault. It's the fault of HP, Acer, Lenovo and others who install all the crapware before selling you a machine. If you buy the parts from a place like Tigerdirect/ NewEgg, and install a fresh copy of Windows 7/8 on it, then there is no crapware. What I actually did with my last Windows 7 laptop was format the hard drive as soon as I got it and reinstalled from a disk I had got from a buddy of mine. With Windows 7, there was no special OEM only keys that didn't work with regular install disks. Although I was at BestBuy a few weeks ago and the sales person offered a $100 service that would do exactly that. Wipe the hard drive clean, and install just windows, along with the drivers, but without all the bloatware. So, I agree this is a real problem, but the blame shouldn't be put on Microsoft. If MS tried to put pressure on them to stop doing that, they would probably have another antitrust suit on their hands.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  2. Maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People aren't buying "Windows 8" PCs, they are buying "cheap" PCs that, as an amazing coincidence, come preinstalled with the latest version of Windows (which is... Windows 8)

    What's the point of this article, and why the comparison with Apple?

    1. Re:Maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What's the point of 99% of the complete shit that theodp submits?

  3. Boot from usb. by ipquickly · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They work fine, once you put an operating system on them.

  4. Re:Cheap windows 8... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A turd is a turd, I wouldnt touch it even for free. Think about TCO and ROI. I used my Mac for more than a year at my job until they actually bought one "for me".

    Well yeah, but the underlying hardware might be decent enough. If that's the case then you can put Linux have the best of both worlds: cheap hardware and an excellent OS.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  5. Re:I really hope.... by mdsharpe · · Score: 5, Informative

    The first boot tutorial shows mouse gestures or touch gestures or both, depending on the machine's capabilities.

  6. Re:I really hope.... by rikkards · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There isn't (well not a normal desktop). There is a tutorial about Metro when you first log in.

    I was hugely skeptical about 8 and installed it on a spare machine the wife will be using. I have probably put about 5 hours in of just playing around and to be honest it is surprisingly easy to get used to and not bad to work with. The Windows key is definitely your friend. I was thinking you would need touch as well before but it works fine without. There is still a couple areas where I question but I wouldn't necessarily reimage a machine back to 7 if it had 8 at this point.

  7. Windows 8 is a fail by ShakaUVM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Earlier today, the entire chess club surrounded one of these new $250 Windows 8 machines. They were all poking at the screen, but while it was changing colors on them, it wasn't responding. (Guess what guys? That's not a touchscreen. Those colors are what you get when you poke a normal LCD display.) They were convinced that all Windows 8 machines had touchscreens, though, and so they never used the touchpad.

    And then they tried shutting it down. I was mocking them for a while, as an entire chess club couldn't figure it out, so then they passed it to me and I couldn't figure it out either. Turns out the option to shut it down is hidden behind an invisible menu, hidden behind two other submenus unrelated to shutting things down.

    We eventually had to look it up online, as I expect many people will have to do.

    It was an interesting case study though, in how fucked up Microsoft made the Metro UI.

    1. Re:Windows 8 is a fail by wisty · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's alike an OSX 10.3 (or later) Mac - you don't have to shut it down. Just let it sleep. It'll run rock solid for months. A restart is an advanced trouble-shooting technique.

  8. Re:Cheap windows 8... by ruir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it worth the effort dealing with hardware, UEFI, lack of support for Linux, hacking and the overall inconsistency (yet), of the several Linux desktops /: I use and hack Linux servers/and in virtual infra-structures (aka cloud for PHBs), but cant bother to have Linux for my desktop. Time is money.

  9. Cheap? by symbolset · · Score: 4, Informative

    If they wanted a cheap netbook to put Linux on, Google is selling Acer's Intel-based dual-core 64bit VT-enabled chromebook with 2GB RAM and a 320GB HDD for $200.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  10. Re:I really hope.... by Balthisar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Two were HTPC front-ends for Plex (a Zotac MAG and a Zotac ZBox). Win8 is reportedly less resource hungry than Win7, so on those little Atom nettops, it seemed like a good way to get a performance boost. Although given that all they do is run Plex, performance wasn't really an issue anyway. Chalk these up to "new toy," then. (No Windows key over VNC kind of sucks, though.)

    The third was a VM install, which I mostly need for EveMon, OneNote, and Access (no Mac versions). Given my use, Win8 isn't as bad as a lot of other people seem to indicate; it doesn't take too long to get used to. I've always been a keyboard shortcutter anyway, and the stupid menus are only stupid if you have to use a mouse. I miss alt-v-d in the "File Explorer" (né "Windows Explorer") though.

    --
    --Jim (me)
  11. Re:Cheap windows 8... by r1348 · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's because Atoms use a licenced PowerVR graphic core from Imagination Technology that provided a binary-only linux driver, and it sucked hard.
    Later kernels have the gma500 driver that provides at least basic functionality on those turds.

  12. Re:Cheap windows 8... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    , but cant bother to have Linux for my desktop. Time is money.

    When it comes to installing all the programs I need, keeping security up to date, making sure all the tools run well together, making sure my development environment has access to the libraries I need etc, I can't be bothered with anything but Linux for the desktop. Time is money.

    and the overall inconsistency (yet), of the several Linux desktops /

    Overall inconsistency? Surely you jest? My window manager config is not much changed from the late 90's. I've not had to adapt to new and more poorly functioning (I've tried, but always revert) desktop environment in a decade and a half.

    Linux is the only system that has provided any degree consistency over all these years. Heck, the Window decorations bear much more similarity to pre Window-95 than to 95 and after.

    Oh and because of the flexibility of X11, I can configure my window manager to beat poorly behaving applications into submission so thay they behave consistently with the rest of the system. This is some not generally possible on the less good operating systems: if an application programmer thinks they know better you have to put up with their poor decisions. (And now the Wayland folks are trying to bring that to Linux. But that's another rant.)

    I haven't even had to give up compositing support. FVWM works side by side with any of the xcompmgr derivatives. I played with drop shadows and transparency and animations a bit for fun, then disabled them because I found they intefere with work.

    So actually, if you look at it from another point of view, Linux, or specifically X11, offers a far more consistent user interface than the other operating systems.

    Time is money.

    Yes and no. I use Linux for two reasons. Firstly it's much more efficient. Secondly it's much, much more pleasant to use. I avoid jobs where I have to use Windows for the same reason I avoid jobs which involve being repeatedly jabbed with pointy sticks. Sure the jobs might pay well, but why do something I disklike?

    Time is more than money. You only get time once.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  13. Great Value by tuppe666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If they wanted a cheap netbook to put Linux on, Google is selling Acer's Intel-based dual-core 64bit VT-enabled chromebook with 2GB RAM and a 320GB HDD for $200.

    I noticed this too. They do seem incredibly good value. I have no idea why Google are not pushing them more. The deal is also unfortunately US centric. I did notice that Google is planning on launching a touchscreen version, which hopefully would bring me Ubuntu with Androids in a virtual machine.

  14. Let's nip this one in the bud by Flipao · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Laptop Hunters campaign is almost 4 years old, and completely irrelevant in this day and age when we're talking about perception of value, it costs just over $300 to buy into Apple's ecosystem and even less to buy into Google's..

    I find it interesting that this tidbit was glossed over.

    However, the scene wasn’t so rosy for Microsoft at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, where analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray and team observed and tabulated traffic and sales at Microsoft and Apple stores. Microsoft saw 47 percent less foot traffic than the Apple Store did, and far fewer sales — 3.5 items per hour, compared with 17.2 items per hour at the Apple Store, as reported by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt. Most of the items purchased from the Microsoft Store were Xbox 360 games. During the two hours that the Piper Jaffray team observed the Microsoft Store, they didn’t see any Microsoft Surface tablets being purchased.

  15. Re:Run 98SE on that computer. by mystikkman · · Score: 4, Informative

    >7 slowed down on the first SP.

    Does anyone have any objective benchmark or reference for this? This is not true at all on the 4 machines I used daily (Work PC/Home Desktop/Laptop/HTPC). The last OS that slowed down with more patches and usage was XP.

    Also, XP didn't start off fast for me. It was slower than ME on the machines at the time. Of course, Vista was much more bloated in the beginning though.

  16. Re:My nine year old P4 by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Heck that"s nothing, here at the shop I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz I use as a nettop, it has a dual boot XP/7 and both run just fine, it has 2Gb of RAM which maxes out the board but other than that its pretty much stock. I'm thinking about trying to slap a mobile Athlon in here next week (just to see if I can, supposedly a lot of these socket 754s could take the mobile chips) but it does everything you'd expect a nettop to do, surfs, downloads, hell it'll even play SD flash videos smooth.

    So while i agree one can do just fine on an older machine i just have to ask...a P4? Really? You DO know those were power hogs, right? Maybe you should look into swapping that board for one of those cheap AMD E350 boards, it idles at around 6w, maxes out less than 20w and with a dual core APU you'd get better performance and not be wasting power and cooling on the piggie P4. I'm all for saving old gear from the scrapheap but there is a reason why i sell all the P4 and Pentium D systems that comes through my door while keeping the AMD, the difference in power and heat really isn't funny.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  17. Re:I really hope.... by kannibal_klown · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's nowhere near as bad as the many reviews make it out to be.

    Yes, it has its issues and I don't agree with everything they did. And it's obvious they're trying to bring Tablet and PC together.

    But I applaud trying something "different" Face it, the UI design for Windows hasn't changed much since the 3.1 days (or I perhaps the 95 days). Even OSX has had pretty much the same UI since it was released, and has a LOT in common with its old System X days.

    And Windows 8 is actually fairly nice, ONCE you get used to it. That's the problem: you're getting used to something that's different that what you've known for the last 20+ years. The various reviews use previous OS's as a template to say "THIS is good design, and here's why" when really they're just stating UX concepts that were founded AROUND the interfaces that were popular and long-living.

    The only real annoying things to me are:
    - Shutting Down / Rebooting is insanely stupid. Like 8 mouse clicks.

    - The 3rd party metro apps go over-board with the scrolling text. To the point that you can't tell what a lot of those 3rd party "tiles" actually are. Most of the ones that come with Windows 8 are fine though: the title of the app or an icon is on the tile so you know what's what.

    Will it last long? Probably not, enough people will not like getting used to it that I'm sure Microsoft will have to back-peddle in Windows 9 to a more classic UI.

  18. Re:Run 98SE on that computer. by IndustrialComplex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Caveat: I'm a 99% windows user with just about enough unix experience to traverse a directory structure.

    I'm not sure how you quantify faster, there are a lot of things which mean 'faster' to me:

    From the initiation of the OS boot process to when my scripts start loading VHDs it takes about 15 seconds. (I use that as a benchmark because that's approximately where the system becomes responsive to a user on a clean install) I've not yet timed Ubuntu for booting, so I can't compare that directly (I don't think loading from the USB is a fair comparison since my OS is loading from RAID0 SSDs)

    However, in terms of actual performance once the OS is up and running or installed on a machine... It doesn't seem nearly as fast. Certainly not the freaking Dash application search thing. The UI design on that is horrible. I find myself wondering if I actually clicked it, I assume yes because the rest of the screen dimmed, but I've been having nothing but trouble with it so I typically just launch everything from the terminal now.

    I'll be installing Ubuntu directly to the machine later today, so I'll get a good comparison on boot times and a clean install, but in terms of pure 'faster' performance from the user perspective, not based on what I've seen. Anecdotal evidence, but that's all that matters to me because I don't care if it works better in theory or in general, I only care if it works better for me.

    The thing is: I WANT to like linux. It's why I have a semi-annual install fest on my machines (which slowly migrate back to Windows over several months), but there is no way I can consider it 'faster' if the instant I run into an issue there isn't an intuitive way to correct the issue. That eats up my time, and that colors my perception of the speed of the system. Right now, Linux seems to be much like a F1 race car. Sure, when it goes, it goes fast, but in between those periods of speed are significant chunks of time where a team of experts is rebuilding, tuning, and prepping the system for it's next sprint.

    I know this is probably pretty obvious, but I run into an issue with a machine that is running an ATI R300x video card. Unity does not play well with it. So right now I'm trying to figure out what is wrong with it, and reading the tech threads mentions things like "This issue is known, and may be worked on" Of course, these threads are 2-3 years old, so I wonder if I'm just missing the obvious fix/patch/update/setting which resolves the issue. I haven't found it yet, I haven't looked hard though, but it's already taken up more time than I care to invest when I KNOW I could just install XP and have the system running well in 90 minutes. I'll probably toss some more time into it this weekend, but in the meantime that system will just be my hobby/learning system and that's a big issue for the perception of linux. Again, I bet it will be fast... after it's running (which may just involve me buying a whole new piece of hardware)

    Heck, I wanted to install a python environment/stack (enthought), and it took me a good bit of time to just get it to install (chmod to make it executable, proper syntax to run the .sh file) Then I had to double check the appropriate path since that isn't intuitive to me yet (do I put it in /bin? Or somewhere in home?) So I install it, and then I'm told to make sure my PATH is updated... do I do that in .profile, .bashrc, somewhere else? How do I make I make that stick? Once I do it, I'll know it but...

    Remember I'm a newbie to this, and thus all of this tweaking around the backend just to get things to the point where they would be faster costs me time, and every minute I spend looking up arcane error messages, or wondering how the hell do I do..., is a minute that I'm thinking "I could be done already if I had just stuck with Windows"

    So faster comes to mean a lot of different things, and the fact that a mail client or firefox loads up 0.3s faster than the windows equivalent doesn't mean much (to me).

    --
    Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
  19. Re:Run 98SE on that computer. by asylumx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do you think that the GP having to uninstall and install various distros and try them out is going to make him feel like linux, as a whole, is somehow FASTER?