Presto an old Windows PC a second lease on life!
[Update] We successfully ran Presto on Windows 7. And while we couldn’t print on our IP-based Dell and HP network printers with Windows 7 (no drivers yet perhaps), Presto had no problem!
If there’s a piece of software that really is worth its price, it’s Presto.
For $20, the Xandros utility will boot your Windows XP or Vista machine in seconds instead of minutes.
Don’t believe me? Well, check out the videos below comparing the loading and shutting down times for the same dual-core Athlon 64 PC used for the test.
Installing Presto on a Windows machine takes only a few seconds (here’s a link to the screencast of the installation).
On the next reboot, an option appears giving the option to start Windows or Presto, which is actually an optimized version of Linux that loads very very fast.
How fast?
About 30 seconds from start to loading the Firefox Web browser. In comparison, it took over 3 minutes from the Windows login prompt – which took about 30 seconds to appear – to loading Internet Explorer and getting the first Web page up.
Same thing with shutting down the PC: 3 seconds with Presto, over 40 seconds for Windows!
As reported when it was announced last March at the Demo conference, Presto is perfect if all you want is access to the Internet (browse, email), chat on Skype, load a few documents to view and perhaps edit, watch a video, listen to music.
Which, when I think of it, is most of what I do.
Presto is also useful to give that old PC a second lease on life!
To be fair, I thought I’ll include the video for Windows XP booting up:
And shutting down:
[...] Delivers, Boosts Windows PCs In Seconds! Collected by techpulse360 75 mins ago from techpulse360.com // Event.onDOMReady(function() { // sizeText($(‘video_title’), 475); // }) collect this [...]
[...] But the overall slow performance could be caused by Windows Vista, which should significantly increase after I install Xandros’ Presto. [...]