trubleshooting a laptop

[Sarunas Burdulis]

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On 03/27/2013 02:17 PM, Douglas Pollard wrote:
> Hi All, My Daughter has a Dell laptop about 5 years old. It has been a
> nice machine. She bought it used and it was slow as death. It had xp on
> it and she took it to a shop and they installed windows 7 and either
> added a memory stick or replaced the old on with no difference in speed.
> I sent her an Xubuntu live disk for her to try linux with  the thought
> that if it ran at a reasonable speed I would consider the problem is in
> windows. She wasn't able to get it to run as she probably needed to
> press the F12 key to run off her dvd drive or somethin. She is comming
> here this weekend so I thought i'd try to get the devd to run Xubuntu. 
> Also I would like to get her hooked on Linux.  Will running Linux off a
> DVD tell me anything about the condition of the hard ware or soft ware. 

Starting applications from a Live DVD might be much slower, than it
would be from a system installed on a hard drive. You can run

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

which will give you a rough estimate of memory (cached reads) and disk
(disk reads) throughput.

> She needs Microsift office for her work.  I guess i could install it as
> a virtual program in xubuntu couldn't I??  

MS Office probably won't be very stable in Wine emulator. CrossOver
(commercial) might be another option, but I haven't tried. Running
Windows+Office as a virtual OS in VirtualBox on Linux won't be faster,
though Windows may appear to start quicker, and will also need
sufficient RAM.

It might be that LibreOffice/OpenOffice will suffice for what is needed
for her work.

Sarunas Burdulis
http://math.dartmouth.edu/~sarunas

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