Many years ago I built a machine to run XP - it's an Athlon 64 - Opteron 180 with 2GB of ram. With an MSI Neo 2 Platinum it was the hot ticket at the time. It did OK in it's time but as the Windows OS's got bigger and better and needed more resources I built an entirely new machine for Win 7,8,10. The old machine went by the wayside and sat - that was circa 2009.
Recently I thought I would dig it out and play around with Linux. I have installed several distros from full Ubuntu to Xubuntu - anything light weight. No matter which install I use the machine is slow, as in really, really slow. I even put in an SSD with clean installs to see if that would improve speed - almost no change - deadly slow. So I started to conclude that it was just old tech and it was going to be that way. After a couple of days and numerous installs with no change I decided to do a test - by installing a copy of Windows 7 Pro that I had lying around. It was a cranky install with the old bios needing some setup tweaks to get it to read the Windows distro on a USB flash drive. Once I got it installed and updated - shazzam! - the old machine was (relatively) fast again. It's actually pretty useable for day to day browsing and such.
So the question - why wouldn't any Linux distro work as it should? I'm thinking it is totally hardware related, but why wouldn't Linux configure itself and sort out hardware issues the way that Windows has? It's a mystery.
Recently I thought I would dig it out and play around with Linux. I have installed several distros from full Ubuntu to Xubuntu - anything light weight. No matter which install I use the machine is slow, as in really, really slow. I even put in an SSD with clean installs to see if that would improve speed - almost no change - deadly slow. So I started to conclude that it was just old tech and it was going to be that way. After a couple of days and numerous installs with no change I decided to do a test - by installing a copy of Windows 7 Pro that I had lying around. It was a cranky install with the old bios needing some setup tweaks to get it to read the Windows distro on a USB flash drive. Once I got it installed and updated - shazzam! - the old machine was (relatively) fast again. It's actually pretty useable for day to day browsing and such.
So the question - why wouldn't any Linux distro work as it should? I'm thinking it is totally hardware related, but why wouldn't Linux configure itself and sort out hardware issues the way that Windows has? It's a mystery.