People who know me are often treated to the occasional rant about how difficult I find it to believe that people still use any form of MS Windows. After all it costs a small fortune, doesn't come with any bundled software; needs constant vigilence to avoid malware and, in my opinion at least, a high level of technical competence to run efficiently. Compared to many of the Linux distributions (distros) XP is and was something of a lumbering beast.

Still with the release of Windows 7 I have had to eat my words a little and concede that the latest offering from the Redmond boys and girls is certainly a well constructed little beastie and any system admin will tell you that after more than a decade in the wild XP is rock solid if only because after ten years all the bugs have been reported. But its still a hard experience for the pocket, especially if you plan on having multiple computers.

As an aside I almost find myself siding with Microsoft when it comes to dodgy copies of their OS. In recent months 15% of my customers have had illegal copies of Windows and while I do not condone (nor supply) illegal copies of their software, I can understand what happens in the real world when you have the number 1 product and want to sell it for £70 a go. For many a reason to find copies of the OS on bittorrent sites and for me another reason to leave Microsoft and make the short trip to the land of open source/GNU software.

What prompted today's Victor Meldrew style rant was this: I have XP and Ubuntu on my PC with the Windows partition there mainly for use in diagnosing problems from clients, its not used a great deal but today I booted up thinking that it would need some updating and boy was I right about that!

AVG was first past the post with an update but since I had not used it in a while it also attempted to do a full scan at the same time. Ouch!

Windows update fired up a few seconds later and began to download various files and a java platform decided that it needed updating and immediately started.

Meanwhile XP was threatening to restart because something - by now I was not sure what - had finished updating. It took repeated clicks to stop it shutting down in the middle of an update of the java platform.

Once all this had been completed AVG wanted to do a full scan and Windows having downloaded files wanted to install them. Despite having a dual core processor and a gig of RAM on my rig the amount of processor cycles being used meant I could do nothing else! XP has always wanted a lot of cycles to run and while Vista may have got the "skunk eye" when it came to being a resources hog, on anything less than a couple of gigs, XP moves with all the speed of a pensioner on a bus as well maybe not on the first install but install a 10 or 15 applications and watch that speed plummet.

At this point I can hear some pro-Windows people shouting "Yeah, well Linux is too complicated and it can't do games, see!" On the latter point with the exception of some games written for Linux and Cedega Linux they are right. But having been in the PC repairs for some years now I know that the average user out is not running a water cooled gaming behemoth and worried about frame rates on Call of Duty. Fact of the matter is, if you want decent gaming forget the PC and opt for a PS3 or Xbox360. On being complicated, while that may have been true of the distros three or four years back, the latest versions of LinuxMint, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Fedora etc are all simple to operate and can be picked up by the average user in a few minutes. Click the Firefox icon and you are off. After all, realistically, how much time does the casual user spend outside the browser enviroment. While we are not yet a cloud computing/web 2.0 community, the browser is king. But if a user needs more; DVD playing, office suites and a ferocious amount of free software are there for taking. You never need to defrag or no need for Anti-virus. I have run various distros for years and while occasionally there are hardware issues there is usually an OS that will suit most systems, from a 386 (but don't expect too much) to the latest quad core super machines. Install is usually painless but if you are worried myself and lots of people like me will usually do the work for you and usually it will not cost an arm or a leg to do it.

In the meantime, XP has been consigned to the cupboard of its partition and Ubuntu is up and running at speed and happily. If you fancy checking one out, Google for Linux and burn your own or if you are in the Hastings and St Leonards, drop me an email and I'll sort out a disc for you. Just pop it in, have a look, it won't install until you want it to, but will load into memory and give you a feel for what Linux is all about. Give it a try I don't think you'll be disappointed.