View Single Post - Windows is running very slow.

Dud3! · Rated XXX

Well, if you're going to do that, I have one of the possible answers for that question:

Having maintained a few companies in my area for three years, I can tell you what happens when you choose windows for an office environment, lots of stuff that costs money.

I wish I had kept track of all the money that was spent maintaining the computers at the offices due to windows crap in general, spyware, viruses, and endless crap. I patched the systems together, installed AVG (replacing the newest NAV that wouldn't even find the viruses they had), spybot, etc, cleaned all the computers, updated them, did countless things to every system in the offices, just to get them to run for a day at a time.

One of the offices finally let me build new computers and replace one laptop and add another laptop. The computers I built have Windows 2000 installed, and the laptops run XP Home. This fixed a lot of Win98 related problems, but if it wasn't for me maintaining them, they would be a mess soon enough. In fact, one of the owners of one business filled his system with spyware, IE hijackers, etc that I had to remove with Spybot, Ad-Aware, and manually since no program could remove one of the IE hijackers (the program written to do so didn't remove the newest version of that hijacker).

If let go, all the systems would be brought down in a short time due to windows needing a LOT of maintenance in an environment that has web access, uses Internet Explorer, and receives hundreds of e-mails daily.

Here's the routine maintenance for the windows systems:

Scandisk for the systems still running 98
Spybot
Ad-Aware
A2 worm remover
AVG full scan
Disk cleanup to remove temp files (can be done on startup, but doesn't always work)
Diskeeper (defragmentation)
Windows update
AVG update
Spybot update
Ad-Aware update
A2 update
and a few minor things.

Now, let's step over to the Linux side.

If this business ran Linux, here's what they'd have:

No virus/spyware/ad-ware/hijacker worries whatsoever. No need for anti-virus and spyware/worm removers. No money and time spent updating those programs, no money and time spent calling me to remove stuff that the programs can't.

No worries about e-mail attachments, not having to be interrupted because AVG popped up with a virus notice when checking e-mail.

No worries about maintenance, at all. That's right. Look at the Windows maintenance above. Now look at the maintenance required for a desktop Linux system:

That's right, that's the maintenance I do for my systems. I use it every day for a LOT of different stuff and I do nothing for maintenance. Not even cleaning /tmp.

Then let's toss in the fact that they can laugh about any worm threats on the news, because oh hey! That doesn't matter, I'm running Linux, a worm won't bring my system down.

Then we can add the fact that they can run Linux 24/7 without having to restart due to memory leakage, bugginess, etc. The fact that it's more stable and secure, on and on.

Now let's cover your requirements BC:

Web page: for a small business, a hosting company such as Prohosters (running FreeBSD) would be a better idea than running their own web server. If they wanted to host their own, a server running Linux and Apache is easy enough to setup, and better than the Windows solution (you use that combo yourself).

Internet access is not a problem of course, neither is email and printing. I set up my printer computer as an internet gateway, DHCP server, and local and remote DNS and it worked fine. Now I am back to using the main computer running windows for the internet connection (because I'm moving and taking the printer computer with me) and am having trouble with some stuff.

Spreadsheets, presentations, memos and documents are all handled by Open Office, which can save files in MS formats if needed by other people outside the office.

Access to all their stuff: I assume you mean over the network, or do you mean from anywhere over the internet? Either way is not a problem because each user can access their files via SSH or SFTP, or a webserver can be set up and their files can be kept in the public_html directory with a password prompt when accessed over the internet with a browser.

You end with a "WHY?". WHY because of the points I've already made.
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Due to a not-that-interesting turn of events, I am now known as Justin Danger.