I'm on fire.

[reddragdiva]

Work laptop talks to the office fine — intraweb, email, shared drives, SSH. I'm all set for an exciting weekend of ... sitting on the couch at home in case shit breaks. No, no 3G to connect from the pub. I HOPE YOU HAVE A REALLY WONDERFUL WEEKEND OUT. Bah.

They've adopted the sort of security one would need when giving people a W*nd*ws laptop: it's so insanely locked down it won't even talk to things on the local network beyond grabbing DHCP and sending and receiving pings. When you're in the VPN, it doesn't do the pings either. Trusted client, but breaking it would be Wrong. And resemble effort.

Windows XP is so insanely, ridiculously fat and slow. Kubuntu is much nicer.

I'm glad my laptop battery wasn't recalled.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

How weird. I've never had that experience. Or do you mean that the install itself is slower? (which is because, by default, a modern linux install will also include office software, photo manipulator and a bunch of other standard stuff).

XP tends to be a bit... um... stately once it's installed.

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

No, i mean i find a perceptible difference between linux and windows running on the same hardware. Although i think it's more to do with Gnome/KDE and applications running within X running like dogs (well three legged whippets at best) I've yet to have XP run slowly on me. It's a perception thing really.

[steer.livejournal.com]

That's true... it also depends what software you are running of course. The software I run which is consistent between operating systems is specialist mathematical software almost certainly originally written on unix and ported to windows as a later concession.

Firefox seems to work more quickly on linux for me.

Also you never quite know how many silly things XP has turned on underneath so you might have silly anti-virus software or (god help you) MS office indexing stuff (pretty much malware as far as I'm concerned) going on churning everything up.

[yaruar.livejournal.com]

Or the worst thing i've seen yet for XP which is the google desktop search, which is a godawful bit of programming which has brought almost every system i've seen running it to it's knees. I have to admit, most of the maths/engineering software i've seen running on windows is pretty awfully written and eats up memory like a famine victim at an all you can eat buffet.
Firefox is a terrible memory hog on xp, which is ironic as it's supposed to be streamlined.. Most of the stuff i've had slowing it is dodgy flash/etc based popups and embedded adverts though.