Tuesday, June 18, 2013

From Windows 7 To Linux Mint - The Lenovo Dragon Breathes Peacefully

I've been struggling to do development on my big lenovo dual pentium 3.4 gHz machine using windows 7. When pushed, this box goes into full dragon mode and huge fans scream to life as the CPUs peg 100% usage. The problem is, in Windows 7, it seems like doing almost ANYTHING pegs the CPU at 100% all part of the NSA spying software they've installed no doubt.

When the system would come back from sleep it would animate through all the background images I had missed locking my system for ten minutes.

Countless times the whole thing would just freeze up. Gool ol Indian H-1B engineering no doubt. So, while Windows 7 runs great on a i7 8 core CPU it runs like crap on  a brute of a box that it should be screamingly fast on. What gives? Obviously all the developers hadn't bothered to test it with older boxes.

Well it got so bad I couldn't run a database, a browser, and eclipse at the same time. So I gave up and installed MINT. Unlike PeppermintOS which is ugly MINT is a full 1 Giga distribution so you can't just slap it on a CD. So I put in a DVD and tried to burn it BUT turns out my refurb has only DVD reading capabilities. That sucks. OK so I slapped it on my smart key and used Auto-Load partition to get it recognized as a proper drive. It ran. But unlike when you boot with it and are allowed to test it all out it just asked "do you want to install it into your windows.." and feeling terrified I was about to blow away my boot I paused.

Then I got angry. Hell yeah blow away windows. I don't care I cant take it any more!

So I clicked. And in a few minutes MINT came up. And my windows 7 boot was nicely preserved.

And then it dawned on me. The beautiful silence. Both CPUs were running at 15%. Which was as it should be. In fact I cannot ever get the CPU to run at 100% dragon breath mode on Linux.

American engineers. God bless em.

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