Performance… this is a tricky one. Your mileage may vary a lot here, so I’m going to talk only about my personal experience with using Windows and Linux system on my own hardware. I always test the hardware I’m about to buy for compatibility with Linux (Windows compatibility is provided by default anyway).

One thing strikes me about Windows XP on the boxes I tried using it. It is really slow! Even on a computer like Pentium III with 256 MB RAM. And this is not an ancient configuration! On older hardware it’s even worse, usually unusable. If you want to use Windows operating system with 128 MB (or less) of RAM, the only “reasonable” choice is to use one of the older and unsupported versions (like Windows 98). This makes you immediately vulnerable to hundreds of worms and malware if you connect to the Internet. Actually, connecting to the Internet from a Windows 98 box is a domain of extreme sports enthusiasts and declared suiciders.

Pic.4 Gkrellm

So, why is Windows XP so slow? There are many good reasons, actually. First of all, if you want to securely connect it to the Internet, you need an anti-virus and a custom firewall (the default one is a sorry-one-direction-only-firewall-like toy) and some anti-spyware tools. This slows things down a lot, especially when the on-access scan is enabled and you do not have a fast enough hard drive and tons of unused RAM to spare. Secondly, there is really no sensible way to use a window manager lighter than the default one in Windows. Microsoft has decided for us which windowing system is the best to use and made it very hard (if not impossible) to run the alternatives (and no, Litestep is no real alternative). Specialized GNU/Linux distros can work even on a PC with a 486 processor and 8MB of RAM — and this is a configuration from 15 years ago! You need a smart distro for that (like Damn Small Linux or DeLi Linux), but it’s still possible, usable and (what is very important in terms of security) supported. What is more, a Pentium II computer with 128 MB of RAM can handle any modern Linux distribution without losing much performance (with a sensible choice of desktop and applications, of course). Sure that your desktop won’t be as trendy as XP with its peaceful desktop theme, yet you’ll be able to use it for real tasks without the continuous “swapping” (in case of XP and 2000), or blue screens and data loss in case of some earlier editions. You can find more information about Linux and old PCs in the article GNU/Linux on old hardware on our vortal.

The latest version of Redmond OS, Windows Vista, will be completely unusable on older PCs. That is, older then 1GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM. GNU/Linux, thanks to the exchangeable desktop and system components, will work on such a configuration for a very long time. Thus, the owners of older PCs that use Windows XP or 2000 will need to make an important decision soon: whether to buy new hardware or use an unsupported OS, with no security patches. Perhaps, migrating to GNU/Linux will be the best (the only reasonable) option then…