/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

I figured since I’m using Vista on my laptop, and I’m using my laptop a bit more recently, that I’d start a little series called “Life with Windows Vista”, and once in a while I’ll come up with something to talk about. I think this week I’m going to whip up an article on what I’ve done so far to make Vista a workable environment here on my laptop. Stay tuned for that.

I’ve decided to go the Linux in a VM route on my laptop. Yes, I know, bad geek, but I’m willing to take the loss of geek points. My main reasons for switching to this setup is battery life and heat. I know I could spend hours trying to get things tweaked just right, but even so it seems that Vista does a bit of a better job as far as these two categories go. My laptop has enough power that running a VM isn’t going to be a big deal, especially when I can just SSH into my desktop and access just about everything there.

This also means I may post some Windows tips/tricks since I’m going to try to keep this thing running in top shape. I may also review some utilities I’m using as well. While I do prefer Linux, I’m also a fan of using what gets the job done.

Lately, I’ve kept the laptop booting into Vista and doing what I need to do there. Why? Well, with the way the laptop is hooked up, opening the lid fully to see is something of a challenge. The problem with Ubuntu (most likely X/Nvidia) is that it defaults to the laptop display and does not output to the external monitor. Once I get booted into Ubuntu, I can use the Nvidia settings utility to set the display, but the issue is that the utility doesn’t save the settings. I have to reset it every time I boot. Now, I’d go through the trouble of setting the Xorg configuration up, but in a week or two the laptop will be back to mobile-only status. I just figured I’d vent a little bit about it here.

Since I’m on the subject of Vista, I’ve been going through a couple of sites trying to get the best performance I can. Right now, it’s not too bad. Sometimes I forget that Windows isn’t all bad, really, but I do prefer Linux. Aero is a decent interface, and seems pretty snappy on the laptop. I turned off indexing, which helps with disk thrashing. I’ve also got Firefox 3 running here, and it works well. There’s a part of me that is pondering setting up Ubuntu in Virtualbox under Vista on the desktop. I’ll have to give it a test and see how it works. If it performs well enough I’ll keep it, otherwise I’ll go through and repartition.