A year on a Dell

It's got to be a year since the Daily News got a new editorial-computing system -- and with it new PCs for all of us in the newsroom. Before the switch, we ran Windows 98 on Celeron 400 MHz boxes with 32 MB RAM, and you could barely use Explorer without crashing about 10 times a day.

So when we got new Dells, it was a pleasant shock to the system. All of you out there might've had XP five years ago, but to me it was -- and still is -- brand new, and a big leap forward in usability and reliability, even compared to Windows 2000.

The same holds true for the Dell, an Optiplex GX520 with 3 GHz Pentium III and 512 MB RAM. Everything runs great. I can have dozens of windows open, run The GIMP, do two simultaneous downloads, open additional Web pages, work on copy -- and it never, ever crashes. Sure, individual programs crap out here and there, but the system itself always stays up.

And the look of the type on the E173FP LCD monitor is the best I've ever used. It looks way better than type does on the iBook G4.

And as far as reliability goes, we beat these things to shit, and the Dell can take it. The way XP runs on this thing, I really have no complaints whatsoever.

So why am I screwing around with Linux so much? That's a very good question. Much of it is the "otherness" of it. Running Linux is so different than Windows or even Mac, even though the latter is Unix-based. One thing I've learned is that viruses notwithstanding, Windows at this stage in its development is very, very solid.

The problem comes in paying for it. ... another topic for another blog entry.