[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux on Laptop

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 18:39, Fred James wrote:
> Mike Palazzini
>  From personal experience, the answer is no, not much.  I am currently 
> using Mandrake 9.1 on a Gateway, duel booting with XP - I keep the XP 
> because if I ever need tech support on the box, I would have to load it 
> anyway.  The install program resized the XP partition for me, and we 
> went on from there.  My only complaint is the amount of disk allotted 
> for XP is more than I had hoped, but in reality it may be that it needs it.

I used PartitionMagic 8.0 to reduce my NTFS filesystem to 8GB on a brand
new Toshiba laptop.

The key is to comb through your XP setup and _remove_ not only the
installed software that you don't have a license for (and is not active
until you input it), but the install files that they plop on the C:
partition as well.

E.g., my system had MS Works 7.0 with MS Office 2003 evaluation.  I not
only uninstalled MS Office 2003, but blew away the install files.  I
easily recovered over 3GB from just that.  After all was said and done,
I had gone from 8.9GB to 4.2GB.



-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                    b.j.smith at ieee.org 
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Subtotal Cost of Ownership (SCO) for Windows being less than Linux
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) assumes experts for the former, costly
retraining for the latter, omitted "software assurance" costs in 
compatible desktop OS/apps for the former, no free/legacy reuse for
latter, and no basic security, patch or downtime comparison at all.