Digital Business

There's one benefit of having a neighbour who lets their dog out at half past midnight to bark at the moon. It lets you get up and get some of the more creative thoughts out of your head before you walk around to your neighbour's front door and ring their bell as many times as their dog barks.

This weekend, I did something I have been thinking about doing for a long while with my laptop. I installed the Linux operating system onto it and wiped off Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. Why? For months, I have been pondering whether to buy a netbook, a mini notebook, a Mac laptop or even an iPad. But, when it came to it, I just could not see what I was going to get for quite a large chunk of money.

My laptop (an HP 530) is perfectly good, as far as the hardware goes. It's a nice size, reasonably light, a good amount of RAM and fairly powerful processor. Windows Vista was OK. It seemed to churn through a lot of processing power when nothing was happening and it took an age to boot up.

These days, most of my personal computing is carried out on the web, such as blogging using Wordpress on a hosted server; GMail for emails and my calendar (which syncs with my work calendar); Picasa for hosting and managing my digital photos. Any letters I type (which is rare) are done through Google Docs and they are hosted there, in the cloud. So, why do I need Windows Vista and Microsoft Office at home?

Couple this with the costs of moving to a Mac (£649 is the cheapest laptop) or an iPad (£429 for the lowest spec model), or a netbook (I have seen them for £200 on the web), I thought I should investigate the 'open source' route. Upgrading my laptop to Windows 7 was going to cost me £85. So, I spent £6.49 on the November 2010 edition of 'Linux Format' magazine from my local newsagent which came with a disc containing the PCLinuxOS operating system for free.

The magazine had simple instructions for installing and, after messing about with trying to install the new operating system so I could have both Windows and Linux on the same machine, I decided to just install PCLinuxOS only and erase Windows and Office (I had backed up all of my documents and files beforehand).

My first impression was just how quickly the laptop was ready to go after I had pressed the power button. I think it took about 30 seconds for my laptop to be ready to use. I could use my mouse and external keyboard straight away and I soon had connected to my wireless broadband.

Happy with this success, I sent out a Tweet to my followers. Soon enough, there were responses from people congratulating me. More than that, there were offers to help me out if I needed some guidance on using Linux. So, using Linux is not a solitary experience. You really are part of a community. That magazine was worth every penny.

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• Links: GNU/Linux Spreads in India, Netbooks (techrights.org)