by John Messina

Created on: June 12, 2008

How many times are you waiting for Windows to stop doing something before you can start a program or finishing working in Word, Excel or Photoshop? Windows uses a lot of CPU power when it's performing background task. This leaves you with restricted CPU usage which prevents you from working effectively and quickly.

Microsoft Windows is not a true multitasking system and when it has to perform background task like, downloading and installing updates, virus scans, or svchost task, your computer slows down because these are high priority tasks for your CPU. With dual core processors this problem has been reduce because you now have more CPU power.

Some of you might have heard of the Linux Operating System. Linux OS is an open source operating system. What this means is that the computer code is free to everyone and can be used to make different versions of Linux, called distributions.

Linux is a UNIX based operating system that is used world wide by engineers, scientist, corporations and everyday people like you and I. Linux has come a long way since it was first developed and now looks like Windows but is much more diverse.

Support and documentation for Linux is everywhere and if you ever need a question answered just join one of many Linux Forums.

I forgot to mention one important thing, Linux OS is free and the thousands of programs that are available are also free. You don't have to go looking all over the internet for these programs they can all be downloaded from a program module that's part of the PC Linux OS.

There are many different distributions (versions) of Linux and it can be confusing on which one to try out. You can visit the Linux homepage at www.linux.org. Feel free to browse around and get acquainted with Linux. The one I am using is called PC Linux OS 2007 and can be downloaded from this website www.pclinuxos.com. Just scroll down the page and click on the download mirrors link. The download is an ISO file and you will need a program to burn the ISO image to a CD. See my references below where you can download a good freeware ISO program that is easy to use.

I found that PC Linux OS closely resembles Windows XP. I highly recommend that you use this one to try out. Once you burn the ISO to a CD you have 2 Gigs of compressed programs on one CD.

You can try out PC Linux OS 2007 straight from the CD without ever having to touch your hard drive. When you first turn on your computer you will see something like: "Hit F12 to enter Setup" or "Hit F2 for Boot

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