Last week, I bought a new laptop. It’s a great machine and I was able to get Kubuntu running on it with nearly zero hitches in the time it took me to ride the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I may be the first person ever to install Linux on a subway train—I’m not sure. I figured that since this new machine was fully pumped and equipped with a graphics card, I’d keep a small windows partition for the occasional video game quickie.

It’s been about a week and yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I decided to futz with Windows, which is something I usually loath doing. I booted into that nasty soup of unneeded and bloated programs and started uninstalling all the stupid free shit that came with my default install. It’s amazing to see the first boot difference between a fresh Kubuntu install and my fresh from the factory Windows install. Kubuntu is blazing while XP, on a dual processor with a gig of RAM and a 128 meg Nvidia card is slow as fuck, bogged down by a ridiculous mess of programs all set to run automatically. Nearly all of these programs are crap to me. You’d think they’d want to show off how fast their machines are by not crippling them at boot. I just don’t get it.

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