Nick Arcifa
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
Joined: 3 years, 8 months ago
Dear gurus,
I have an old windows XP machine (800mhz, 346mb ram, Sapphire 9200SE series graphics card.) and I was wondering if i would get any type of benefit swapping over to Ubuntu 8.04 as my computer is slow and I am really starting to notice it.
Believe it or not I actually play WoW on this machine, albeit it's slow and you don't get the greatest fps while playing (about 15 fps average on lowest video options). It is still enjoyable if you avoid high population areas. So my question is "is it better to ditch XP and take up Ubuntu 8.04 as my new operating system and run WoW under wine, or stick with XP?
Cheers,
Nick Arcifa
Chris Burrage
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Worth Swapping to Ubuntu 8.04
Absolutely no idea, but costs nothing to try. Image it so you can restore if you aren't happy and give it a go. (Or buy another hard drive and bung that in - 80GB about $50).
Chris B
DanyJ
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Worth Swapping to Ubuntu 8.04
Hi Nick
Great idea. I think you should have no hesitation to try out Ubuntu. In a few weeks, the next release 8.10 will be out. And promises improvements as usual.
However, with the hardware you have you will be at the low end of the performance scale. But I am confident you will get a better performance with Ubuntu than XP, as long as you do not enable the 3D desktop office (it probably wont work with your graphic card anyway?).
It depends what you looking for exactly. I don't now about the games you are playing udner wine? but you may try Cedega (www.cedega.com) which is a wine port specifically for Windows games.
Give it a go - at least I am sure that there are other things you might find Ubuntu useful for. It is rarely a mistake to try something new.
Cheers
Daniel
PS : feel free to emailgit099-linuxhelp@yahoo.com.au if u encounter any issues.
stomfi
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Worth Swapping to Ubuntu 8.04
I refurbish machines with Ubuntu and this one makes the grade. The ATI video card has open source drivers and does 3D.
Try the CD on a live reboot, then if you have enough room on your drive, start XP, insert the CD and install using WUBI via the CD prompts. Reboot and select Ubuntu from the menu. Install any updates and extra software you may want and try out your game. Find out if all your peripherals work, or if you can install drivers for them. You may need extra codecs which you can get by installing all the gstreamer stuff via the add/remove menu. Do a search on gstreamer to find them all.
If the response for your game is better than XP, then reboot with the CD and do a hard drive install, otherwise keep XP. You'll have to do the Ubuntu updates and extras again if you install on the hard drive.
Ian Caldwell
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Worth Swapping to Ubuntu 8.04
Ubuntu 8 is a product of 2008, XP is a product of 2001 (albeit repeatedly fixed up) your PC will be slow with it and trying to run wine and the a game will make it slower, Xubuntu 8 will be better, as it runs a less demanding desktop.
There are some less demanding linux operating systems, try looking on http://distrowatch.com/
fredd splatt
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Worth Swapping to Ubuntu 8.04
Even though I am a Linux man, I would not recommend trying to play WoW under wine on a slow machine, because it will be slower still.
Ubuntu with Gnome would probably be a bit slow also; try xfce.
Regarding the slowness of XP, try emptying IE's cache and the recycle bin, then de-fragging. Another Gb of ram would help, as wow chews up about 350Mb all by itself.
Don K
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago
Joined: 12 years, 5 months ago
Re: Worth Swapping to Ubuntu 8.04
You might find on this slightly older machine that your WoW will slow down, since it will be running under Wine in Ubuntu ... worth going to the Wine website to find out if it works with it too.
Having said that, I think Ubuntu is fantastic ... I'm using it on this PC, and I've been giving discs away to people at work.
