I was given a DELL Inspiron 8200 running XP Pro. It has an ATI Radeon 9000 video chip, a Pentium 4 2GB CPU with 1GB of RAM and a 60GB HD, and two USB 1.0 ports, plus the regular features.
The owner said it often failed to boot or stay up if it did, and wouldn't connect to the internet, which was why it was given to him. As a Mac man he couldn't fix it.
The problem turned out to be an application called "Covenant Eyes", which is designed to help someone keep track of what their kids are doing on the Internet, or help folks who have an addiction to Internet porn over come it. It doesn't block sites but it does sent reports of URLs visited to the "mentor" or parent. The box got infected with virus which also tried to put itself into the LSP stack, where Covenant resides, and the two had an ongoing conflict about which was going to rule the roost. To remove Covenant one had to call the company, give an ID and password to access their account, in order to get a code which the removal app required in order to remove Covenant. The laptop was running Avast!, which didn't detect the virus. I removed Avast! and replaced it with Microsoft's Security Essentials, which immediately detected the virus and allowed me to remove it. That allowed to box to boot up and run properly. I installed CCleaner, which cleaned up over a GB of cookies, bad Register entries, and URL history. The box was running very well, but the only way to get rid of Covenant was to reinstall XP Pro. He didn't have the recovery CD.
So, he told me to wipe it and put Linux on it because "that's what you always want to do, right?" 8)
I installed Kubuntu Oneiric, 11.10. It slipped on with only two snags: the DELL PCI modem card did not work, and the title bar on application windows was dislocated to the right about the width of the three buttons in the upper right corner.
I plugged in an eth cable to get internet connection. I installed wicd, removed the NetworkManager and restarted the network. Then I installed "firmware-b43legacy-installer" for the Broadcom 4306 wireless chip and wicd immediately reported my ESSID, which I connected to. (Neither fwcutter-b43 nor firmware-b43-installer worked) My bandwidth is 15MB but that wireless gave only 3Mb/s, about equal to a Tier III DLS connection.
The title bar dislocation was fixed by using xrender instead of opengl on the advanced page of the Desktop settings.
The screen is beautiful, the sound is gorgeous, and in idle the CPU temp cycles between 122 F and 145 F as the fan turns on and off, and the CPU cycles around 10% usage. The whittle bug residing between the G, H and B keys works nicely as a mouse, as does the touch pad. The sound control buttons on the bezel work well. YouTube videos on full screen run nicely. KStars also does well. I haven't tried K3b on the DVD yet, but a USB stick works nicely.
XP wasn't shabby, but comparing Oneiric with a cleaned up XP Pro on the same box I'd say that Oneiric is about 10% faster, but Covenant Eyes was running all the time.
While that laptop remains on the XP retail channel tally sheet, it is now running Oneiric like a champ.
The owner said it often failed to boot or stay up if it did, and wouldn't connect to the internet, which was why it was given to him. As a Mac man he couldn't fix it.
The problem turned out to be an application called "Covenant Eyes", which is designed to help someone keep track of what their kids are doing on the Internet, or help folks who have an addiction to Internet porn over come it. It doesn't block sites but it does sent reports of URLs visited to the "mentor" or parent. The box got infected with virus which also tried to put itself into the LSP stack, where Covenant resides, and the two had an ongoing conflict about which was going to rule the roost. To remove Covenant one had to call the company, give an ID and password to access their account, in order to get a code which the removal app required in order to remove Covenant. The laptop was running Avast!, which didn't detect the virus. I removed Avast! and replaced it with Microsoft's Security Essentials, which immediately detected the virus and allowed me to remove it. That allowed to box to boot up and run properly. I installed CCleaner, which cleaned up over a GB of cookies, bad Register entries, and URL history. The box was running very well, but the only way to get rid of Covenant was to reinstall XP Pro. He didn't have the recovery CD.
So, he told me to wipe it and put Linux on it because "that's what you always want to do, right?" 8)
I installed Kubuntu Oneiric, 11.10. It slipped on with only two snags: the DELL PCI modem card did not work, and the title bar on application windows was dislocated to the right about the width of the three buttons in the upper right corner.
I plugged in an eth cable to get internet connection. I installed wicd, removed the NetworkManager and restarted the network. Then I installed "firmware-b43legacy-installer" for the Broadcom 4306 wireless chip and wicd immediately reported my ESSID, which I connected to. (Neither fwcutter-b43 nor firmware-b43-installer worked) My bandwidth is 15MB but that wireless gave only 3Mb/s, about equal to a Tier III DLS connection.
The title bar dislocation was fixed by using xrender instead of opengl on the advanced page of the Desktop settings.
The screen is beautiful, the sound is gorgeous, and in idle the CPU temp cycles between 122 F and 145 F as the fan turns on and off, and the CPU cycles around 10% usage. The whittle bug residing between the G, H and B keys works nicely as a mouse, as does the touch pad. The sound control buttons on the bezel work well. YouTube videos on full screen run nicely. KStars also does well. I haven't tried K3b on the DVD yet, but a USB stick works nicely.
XP wasn't shabby, but comparing Oneiric with a cleaned up XP Pro on the same box I'd say that Oneiric is about 10% faster, but Covenant Eyes was running all the time.
While that laptop remains on the XP retail channel tally sheet, it is now running Oneiric like a champ.