Downgrade to XP or Upgrade to Mandriva

My friend wanted a low cost Laptop and went for Dell 1525. Here in Singapore, it is really a value for money Notebook. For SGD 1099 we get a full featured Laptop with the following Configuration

Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor T2390
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic
2GB DDR2 SDRAM
15.4” WXGA Display with Integrated 2.0 mega pixel web cam
160GB* SATA Hard Drive
8X DVD Burner
Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
Dell™ Wireless 1395 802.11g Wi-Fi Mini-card
1-Year Limited Warranty (Next Business Day On-Site* Service)

Everything is OK with this Laptop, just one issue- It has Vista Basic. Now Vista Basic does not have the cool features of Home Premium, nor is it as snappy as Windows XP. Dell also installs a 30-days subscription of McAffee anti-virus, which although secures the system, but at the same time further makes Vista slower. To further accentuate the problem he uses Netbeans ( his company uses it )for his java development work and had to use OpenOffice ( he does not want to pay SGD 200 for a basic version of MS Office ). Now these two are resource hungry and make Vista crawl. We discussed his problem and came with two possible alternatives

1. Downgrade to XP SP3 ( which is blazingly fast compared to Vista). This was the most obvious option and a good one too as Dell is known to provide drivers for XP and  my friend would have an OS he is very comfortable with. However, there is one problem - MS allows downgrade only for Vista Ultimate and Business editions. That means that my friend has to BUY XP and this defeats the entire purpose of having a Low cost Notebook. Since my Friend had to do some of his official work on this Laptop, so a pirated copy of XP was ruled out. Also, as Dell provided only a 30-Days McAffee subscription, he had to mandatoryily buy a years subscription ( read spend more money). Though extremely tempting this option was ruled out.

Stick to Vista Basic and save the money required to buy XP. Invest some money in McAffee and some more in RAM and get everything working. This sounds great but unfortunately Dell decides to sell a 1GB RAM for SGD 153 and 2GB for SGD 183.   Another very expensive option.

My friend had almost given up and was about to just buy McAffee 1-year subscription and bear the slow Vista. He said that he will upgrade to more RAM after a month or two of saving. It was then that I pitched in and suggested him to give Mandriva 2008 Spring a try. Now he is not afraid of Linux and said that if all the peripherals worked good and the speed is better than Vista, he will consider Ubuntu. His rationale was based on tha fact that Dell officially ships the same Laptop "Inspiron 1525" with Ubuntu pre-installed in US so Ubuntu should have no problem on this one too.  I reminded myself that Ubuntu is the most dominant Distro, but the trouble was that I had to download the Ubuntu LiveCD, whereas I had Mandriva 2008 Spring One on a CD. So we decided to download Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS on my Laptop and in the meanwhile try Mandriva on his Dell.

Good thing for me is that Mandriva One is an excellent flavor of Linux. It comes with almost all the necessary drivers and application. We booted with the LiveCD and in no time we had a beautiful desktop.

I forgot to mention that during boot we had enabled Compiz Fusion, which works beautifully with Intel X3100. Not sure what Mandriva guys have done but the default fonts look beautiful, almost as good as they look on XP. Our next task was to check if all the peripherals work well ?

USB Drive   -- YES

DVD Writer -- YES

8-in-1 Card Reader. We inserted a Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo and Bingo Mandriva detected it and gave  KDE pop-up asking what to do with the new device.

Monitor -- Default resolution was 1200 X 800 ( which is the actual resolution of Dell LCD)

Wireless -- This was a sweet surprise as Mandriva auto-detected the Wireless connection and when we entered the Password, it connected to the WPA-2 Password protected router. In no time we were browsing.

Touchpad -- Works perfectly, though a little extra sensitive.

In-built-webcam -- Works like a charm.

With all the peripherals working out of the box, the next check was for provided software. This is another area where Mandriva One shines. Apart from the beautiful KDE; it has

• OpenOffice,
• Firefox ( as default browser against most KDE based distros which have Konqueror ) ,
• many media codecs,
• GIMP,
• DigiKam,
• Amarok and other media players.
• Support for Windows Mobile Phone, which we could use to sync the new Samsung Omnia.
• Excellent Control Center for any configurations ( if required).

Now these are enough for normal working of an average user. However, he wanted  Netbeans which was an easy download and install from Netbeans website. To our amazement, Mandriva Live CD was easily able to takeup OpenOffice, Firefox and Netbeans all at the same time. Please Note that LiveCD also takes up good amount of RAM.

Here we had Mandriva running from RAM and still faster than INSTALLED Vista Basic on the same hardware. All the hardware was properly detected and working out-of-box; most of the software that he would use on Vista was also on Mandriva ( OpenOffice, Firefox and Netbeans) and the best part is that for Mandriva he does not have to buy any anti-virus.

Needless to say that he instantly installed Mandriva on the hard disk, dual booting with Vista. Finally he got the speed he required and saved money on anti-virus. This all was not done by "Downgrading to XP", but instead by "Upgrading to Mandriva".

P.S: After a while we did try Ubuntu on the same Laptop, but he felt that Mandriva LiveCD was faster and decided to stick to Mandriva.