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Hey guys. I should probably post this in windows section too to get an unbiased answer. Oh well. I have an old laptop I want to give to a friend and dedicate as a media center with some basic web browsing on his bigscreen as well. Would you recommend leaving windows on here and running the windows version of xbmc, or throw jaunty on there and the compatible XBMC version? It is important to note that my friend who will be using this has never used/seen linux before. Are there any benefits to using linux in this situation? Thanks for the help,
Nick
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No, you should leave it right here in general where it belongs. The question you've asked will never result in unbiased answers. If you're lucky, you won't start another OS war thread.
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Really the only benefit to linux is VDPAU (hardware acceleration to watch HD movies), basically everything else in XBMC is the same across both versions. If the laptop supports it that would be a pretty big factor, if not there's not really any reason to switch unless you or he prefers one OS over the other.
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It might be helpful if you could post the hardware specs of the laptop. Browsing itself is no issue since Firefox is available for Windows and Linux.
Playing movies, however, will need much higher hardware requirements. If he wants to watch HD movies, the laptop must be pretty powerful to run XBMC on Windows. Since it is an old laptop you want to give away, the best bet is probably Linux since there VDPAU can accelerated video decoding through the GPU (if it is an NVIDIA).
If you are running on an ATI graphics card then it really doesn't matter much if it is running Windows or Linux since all videos are decoded by the CPU.
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You guys rock, thanks for the fast feedback. I will post the hardware specs later and hopefully you guys can help me make the right decision.
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natethomas
Enjoying Retirement by Staying Busy
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While this kind of question does typical result in flame wars, in between the raging statements, some people do speak relatively clearly. Good job, Matrix and Midgetspy for providing pretty accurate and unbiased info.
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Thanks again for the unbiased feedback. Based on these specs does it really matter if I go linux or stay with windows:
Toshiba Satellite A65 S126 System
2.80 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD-CD-RW Drive
Can this even do HD?
Thanks!
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The laptop has an ATI graphics card so you cannot benefit from hardware accelerated video decoding. The Celeron processors are often under-powered but it might be possible to run 720p videos. I don't think it is possible to run 1080p on that machine.
Since the machine is very low on RAM I would suggest you use XBMC for Linux with a minimalistic operating system. The LiveCD should contain just the stuff necessary for XBMC to run. Windows tends to run many services which are not necessary for XBMC and will eat up plenty of RAM.
For XBMC itself you should use one of the non-HD skins to allow enough free RAM for smooth video playback. Buying additional RAM might be very useful if you notice bad performance because of full RAM and swapping.
