The 5-years old Toshiba Satellite had been my primary computer for well above 2 years.
It came with Vista pre-installed (it didn't suck, glad you asked) and some time down the road I've put Windows 7.
It served me well. At some point, however, I moved on -- first to an HP Probook (which I still use in my day job) and then to a Mac.
For the good part of the last 1.5 ~ 2 years, the laptop was stuffed into a drawer and I almost forgot about it.
Today, I have a day off and decided to check how the old machine is doing.
It wasn't a pleasant experience. I admit I am spoiled by my MacBook Air (mid 2011 model) which (thanks to the SSD and OS X) boots for about 8 seconds -- it is almost instant-on as I pointed here.
The Toshiba, in contrast, boots Windows 7 for well above 3 minutes. Throw in about a minute, minute and a half more until the system gets fully operational.
Enough is enough.
I downloaded and installed Ubuntu.
The machine now starts for about 30 seconds. The total time from boot to opening a Chromium browser is 38 seconds. It's a speed demon (for a 5 years laptop). Literally.
While the installation itself went quite smoothly and was fast, the first time I tried to launch Windows 7 after it (I left it in case I need it) it just blue screened and rebooted the computer. The second time it did exactly the same. Thankfully, Windows own startup repair tool did the job and now I have Windows and Ubuntu happily living on the old computer. And since Ubuntu is so much faster, and I have all I need (good text editors, gcc, Eclipse, command-line tools, git) I guess Windows partitions will soon be reclaimed in the name of the Linux lord.
