i have windows 8 pro installed right now because i got it for free on my HTPC and i was wondering if istead of using windows 8 should i get linux? im using a AMD semptron single core 2.00 GHZ and a nvida GT210 as my graphics card i have a max of 4GB of ram as my mother board is from 2005 lol but i do have a SSD since my motherboard does have sata on it and thats for my boot drive and a 1TB for movies and what ever else i might want to store on it but what do you guys think you'r a smart bunch should i just boot up my computer runing linux or keep 8 or wait for 8 to get service pack 1 and then boot up my PC with that again?
p.s. i use my PC for movies in HD and watching youtube and livestreams at 1080P but windows ahve given me some problems saying i dont have disks hooked up upon shut down and it will not let me turn off my pc will linux just be better all together?
p.p.s. i dont have any money so i can not buy windows 7 for the $90 but i do have enough to donate to the linux team upon the download page.
I'd just stick with Windows if it's already on it. My reasons are that Windows has better graphics card driver support, which isn't a fault on Linux itself but rather a fault on AMD and Nvidia. You also mention watching live streams and YouTube, personally Adobe Flash has always been problematic for me in Linux. It wasn't crashing a lot, it was mostly just UI elements in Flash objects not functioning properly. My last reason would be familiarity and support for Windows. You likely are already very familiar with Windows and getting help to a problem is really simple and probably already documented by the official developer somewhere. In Linux, you're running in an entirely different environment so it'd take getting used to (unless you already are familiar with it) and when you get problems it can be difficult to find solutions. A lot of things aren't already documented, I find a lot of the time you have to rely on in-the-know community members to point you in the right direction.
i do use linux on my laptop "toshiba TB505 intel atom" and i do like it but it is a very strange thing coming from a manliy windows back ground i have had window 96 and every time a new one comes out i get it but windows 8 is haveing some problems with drivers as well for me with nvida even tho my GPU doesnt have updates other than to make it combatible with windows 8 i do like windows 8 but for what i do would i see better performance in boot and load speeds switching to linux on my HTPC?
Boot and load speeds I'm not sure. Windows 8 did improve boot times a lot in comparison to previous Windows versions but I haven't compared it to any Linux distros yet. For load times, I think that is going to depend almost entirely on your hardware. I do know that historically Linux has been better at transferring large amounts of small files, about 2 MB or less (So pictures/documents, etc). The actual differences in operating system performance is really small though, probably not even noticeable in real world scenarios. It depends almost entirely on your hardware more than anything.
well 4GB of DDR ram is not very fast but i do have a kingston 3K SSD and that is for my boot and i just bought today the Adata 128GB one for my HTPC even tho it only has sata 1 and a single sata 2 for my boot but i might just use the dual boot systema nd see if it will be fast or not i think that will eb the easiest way of doing this.
Yeah, may as well just go ahead and test it yourself. But SATA 2's maximum speed is 384 MB/s and SATA 1's is 192 MB/s (theoretically), the biggest thing you could do to improve speed is get a motherboard with some SATA 3 ports on it to take full advantage of the SSDs but then you'd have to buy pretty much a new everything else and I'm guessing you don't have the money for that or you probably would have done it lol.
lol yea but this is my HTPC my gaming pc is old but it does every thing i need since im running 2 ssd's in a raid 0 at 256GB and 1TB HDD with a PNY GTX 550TI and a intel core 2 quad corsair water cooling kit and a good OC but for a HTPC i like the old thing i have lol
Just try it dude - I'm not sure if that will work with Windows 8 but no harm in trying. That will allow you to run both Windows and Ubuntu on the same PC, you just select during boot/within windows.