Netbook Makeovers, Cloud Censorship, and a Lucky Backup

I always have enjoyed Marcel Gagné's writing. He's written some amazing stuff in his Cooking With Linux column over the years. This article is priceless too. He bought a netbook for his five year old son:

Quoting:I have to start it up, log him in, fire up the appropriate application, and so on. It took me a handful of times to discover how impossibly dreadful XP is on a netbook. It was unbearably slow, obtrusive, and definitely not designed for the device in question. The slowness was the part that practically drove me to drinking (more than usual, I mean). Do I need to point out that five year-olds don't have a lot of patience? Waiting 5 minutes while the system comes out of hibernation, lets you log in, reconnects to the network, and brings up a word processor is asking that five year-old to go find something else to do. I won't even go into the annnoying non-stop display of popups that plague Windows users worldwide. No, I refuse to mention it.

So Windows is only for the extremely patient! LOL. I knew that but I love the way he expresses it and his frustrations.

Quoting:So Windows is only for the extremely patient!

Yep. Part of why I spend so much of my day shouting at the computer. I'm not a patient person.

Quoting:So Windows is only for the extremely patient!

Yeah, the thing I miss most about Windows. I'm sorry I bring this up for the tenth time or so, but it is:

Win98 defragmentation. When I was young, sigh. You know, the one with the colored rectangles which takes multiple hours. On a huge 6Gb-harddrive! And if you were defragmenting C:/ and then started Internet Explorer while doing so, it had to restart defragmenting all over again. It was hugely addicting to watch. All those colored rectangles moving, some belonging on the first part of the HD, some at the back, and some in the middle, some 'unmutable' and some going anywhere. Sometimes two at a time, then four or so, then even more - varying randomly, and finally whole pages 'of them blocks' at once. I really miss it. I've been trying to emulate that behaviour in XP (while it ran on top of reiser and VirtualBox), but not successful though. It only shows one plain bar. What fun is that to watch?

Such a thing would be a funny screensaver for Linux!

@hkwint: Defraggler shows pretty blocks still. :)

http://www.piriform.com/defraggler