[Bassey]

My Wife's laptop is somewhere around five years old now (it's so old, we can't actually remember) and was crawling to a halt under XP. It's a Dell Inspiron with 15" TFT, 1.5GHz Celeron, 512MB RAM and DVD Drive. A perfectly decent spec but struggling with modern software - probably down to the RAM as much as anything.

We didn't fancy replacing it as there is nothing wrong with it. So, I either backed everything up, re-installed Windows XP and then set everything up again - not something I was looking forward to - or I looked for an alternative.

I've been looking jealously at the Eee PC and it's clones, running their sleak Linux distros with all the apps built in and on minimal spec machines. So, I decided to go with Linux. After all, 99% of the time the machine is used for Internet and email with the odd bit of Word, viewing photos and producing posters and pamphlets for her various businesses. All things for which Linux is ideally suited.

I eventually settled on gOS (stands for Good OS but could easily stand for Google OS). It's Ubuntu Hardy Heron underneath but has an OSX style skin with a bit of Vista thrown on-top in the form of Google widgets. So last night I backed up the laptop (I'd already taken a VMWare image of it and installed it on the Desktop PC so she had access to that if anything went wrong). The backup took half an hour. Then I stuck the gOS CD in. Setup took less than ten minutes.

WiFi set itself up and created a WiFi widget showing available networks, the signal strength and if they were locked. Seconds later I was on the Internet. Firefox 3 is installed by default. A quick install of Foxmarks and all her bookmarks were synched over and he had access to her Yahoo mail and 30boxes calendar. It also created a battery power widget on the desktop.

Five minutes later and her other email account was up and running in Thunderbird via POP. A few minutes to copy all her Docs, pics and music from the external hard drive (which connected and set itself up in a couple of seconds.

gOS has a OSX style Doc-Bar at the bottom with links to the OpenOffice apps, Firefox and a load of Google stuff. However, a utility is provided to add/remove these icons and replace them with links to other stuff. So I stuck thunderbird, Picassa (brilliant photo software), MPlayer (awful media player software - must look up an alternative) and her 30Boxes calendar in there.

In total, I probably spent an hour getting the latop 95% ready - from scratch! I'm jut missing two (very significant) things. Her Outlook mail archive and address book. I'm thinking of signing up for a trial of one of these GooSynch things on her Virtual laptop to get her mail archive from Outlook into GMail - along with her address book - and then import them into Thunderbird from there.

However, she now has a laptop which is easy to use, flies along, has all the software she needs (at no cost), boots and closes in 5-10s and (shortly) will have all her data and settings in a format that will make it easily tranferably between machines and applicatios, making future switches a walk in the park.

I've been playing with Linux on and off for about 12 years now but this is the first time it's ever been a pleasurable experience. Even her printer set itself up and then warned us it was low on ink (which it was)! It's breathed new life into a very old piece of kit and it's like having a brand new machine. I would say it runs quicker than my Core2Duo 2.4GHz desktop with all the latest RAM, Graphics etc.