Laptop Upgrades and Exploring OS's on Removable Media Part 2 (Linux and Windows on a SD Card)

 

Windows 10 On The SSD Isn't Going To Be A Thing After All (SparkyLinux Really Is A Much Better Choice In Retrospect)

As mentioned in the previous article, while I did experience some thumb-drive setbacks, another idea popped into my head. I had a USB adapter that allowed SD and microSD cards to be inserted. I also had a 64GB SD card (Lexar-brand, 45MB write speed) . What happened it I used that as the host drive for my Linux setup? To be honest, I wasn't expecting much.

Even though their were many contributing factors to the slow performance of USB drives, I've assumed that the speed of the USB 2.0 port was the biggest contributor. As such, I wasn't expecting much. I was then shocked that SparkLinux installed onto the SD card in about 20-25 minutes. The install was again performed from within my VMware Player virtual machine on my desktop PC.

On my thumb-drive install, Linux was nowhere near done at 20 minutes. I took the USB adapter/SD Card out of the desktop and plugged it into my laptop. I went to the boot menu, selected the USB device, and started the boot process. Linux loaded into the desktop in about a minutes. I performed the updates, which installed relatively quickly.

Out of curiosity, I've installed the KDE Plasma desktop and restarted. After the initial configuration, SparkyLinux took about 45 seconds to boot into the login screen. It took Plasma about another 30 seconds to load. It wasn't the fastest, but it wasn't slow either. Much faster than Windows 7 loading from the 5400 RPM drive. I was never able to launch Plasma from the USB thumb Linux. After 3 minutes of waiting, I had that "screw it" moment and just powered off the laptop in frustration.

I've installed the CDE windows manager. CDE is a very oldskool window manager widely used by various UNIX systems in the early 90's. Even though the source code has been released and is open-source now, very few distros have built it from source. In fact, as far as I know, SparkyLinux is the only distro that actually has CDE pre-built in its repository. CDE, LXDE and Enlightenment loaded completely in about 10-15 seconds.

The applications loaded very quickly as well. Firefox took about 5-10 seconds to load from a restored session. LibreOffice took about 30 seconds to load initially. After the initial setup, it averaged about 10 seconds. All the hardware in the Acer laptop, from the display, the touchpad, audio device, and wireless; worked without issues. No driver configuration was needed other than that for the HP office printer, which had no installation issues with the CUPS driver.

I was surprised. Linux was much faster on the SD card with the USB adapter than with a plain USB thumb drive. I even installed OpenArena, a FPS based on the Quake 3 engine, and that ran without issue. I do NOT recommended playing the game using a touchpad though. For the love of God, plug in a real mouse. On the thumb drive, Tecno-ballz, a Commodore Amiga inspired game similar to Breakout/Arkanoid, the game would freeze occasionally about once every 15-30 seconds. These games ran without issue on the SD install.

It has to be noted that while the speed of the USB standards are a contributing factor to a drives performance, it's not the deciding factor though. This is what I realized when comparing the performance of the thumb drive to that of the SD Card plugged into the USB adapter. The Lexar card plugged into the adapter wasn't even a top-of-the-line card either. 

The price of both SD and microSD cards are falling at a very rapid rate, along with SSD's. The performance capabilities on these drives improve on a constant basis as well. The Linux adapter experiment taught me that SD Cards could be legitimate boot devices. January has arrived though, and the SSD has been ordered. Either way though, Linux on the SD Card has been very worthwhile and I haven't been disappointed.

The SSD Is Here!
I've survived the busy holiday season. It was now time to reward myself with that SSD. Their was a major development though. Originally, I've planned on installing Windows 10 onto the drive. However, I realized that I didn't do anything on that drive that was actually Windows-specific though. As a result, I decided to ditch Windows 10 in favor of SparkyLinux.

After setting up the hard-drive into the laptop, I was now ready to install the OS. I've burnt a DVD copy of it, loaded it into the laptop, and booted up from DVD. The install proceeded as normal. The drive was detected and the setup started. About 10 minutes later, SparkyLinux was completely installed. I did a restart, and the OS booted from the drive without issues. After the initial setup, I installed KDE Plasma and restarted the laptop. The complete boot, from BIOS to a fully-loaded desktop (Plasma) with all the startup programs and services loaded, took 45 seconds. Logging in using my quick fingers took a few of those seconds.

A restored Firefox session opened in about 5 seconds. LibreOffice loaded in a few seconds as well. These applications were much more responsive than what I was used to on either the SD Card or the mechanical drives on my desktop PC. Their has been no disappointment. I am a happy pigeon!

Windows 7 via USB Adapter
Now that I have SparkyLinux running on my SSD, I didn't have a need for my Linux SD card install anymore. However, I realized that their might be situations that I might need Windows. As a result, since I figured that Linux ran great off of a SD card, so should Windows. However, 64GB's wouldn't be sufficient enough for a Windows 10 install. Technically, it should, but their wouldn't be that much space left over for anything worthwhile. Essentially 64GB's would only be enough for the OS itself, some applications, some data, and that's about it. While possible, their would be a lot to be desired, and a lot more space would definitely be recommended.

While 256GB's wouldn't be that ideal for a Windows 10 install either, it would be passable if that setup was used primarily for online/office use. I'm waiting for the price of 512GB microSD cards to fall to the $40-$50 dollar zone before I would consider the install worthwhile. 512GB should be enough for a general purpose "portable" version of Windows 10. I decided to install Windows 7 in place as it's more lightweight compared to 10. It's not supported anymore, however, I don't intended to use this setup hardly if at all. This is more of a experiment than anything else.

I've used the Win2USB utility to install perform the base Windows setup onto my SD card on my Desktop PC. Afterwards, I took the SD Adapter and plugged it into my laptop to finish the setup. It went very smooth. Much smoother than my Windows thumb drive install that took a few hours to finalize the install, and never fully worked. The login screen took a few minutes to load, and after 5 minutes of waiting for the desktop to load, I've had that "screw it" moment and stopped that experiment.

With the SD card, the login screen loaded in about 10-15 seconds, and the desktop took about 1-2 minutes to build in the initial setup, and 30 seconds to load after each boot. Initially, Windows 7 was just as quick as Linux was on the SD Card. However, after installing Avast antivirus, drivers, and performing and finishing the Windows update; that was a different story. After getting Windows up to date, the system would take about 2 minutes to load, while the desktop took about 2-3 minutes to load. Their was a lot of disk thrashing as well. Firefox took about 1-2 minutes to load from a restored session.

The Lexar SD Card used has a max write speed of 45MB's a second. However, Windows, and the NTFS filesystem in general, isn't optimized for SD cards. Therefore, after the updates, Windows performs much slower on a SD card than Linux did. The card is a few years old. Their are significantly faster SD and microSD cards on the market though. Windows should be able to achieve significantly better performance on one of these cards than on 45MB one.

However, seeing how a standard Windows 7 install performed on one of these adapter, I'm rethinking my Windows 10 experiment down the road. After setup, I'm probably going to run a lite program to strip out the unnecessary crap in 10 to make the installation as lean as possible.

Currently though, I'm in no rush to create such a setup as Linux is running great from my SSD, and I currently have no need for Windows on a laptop. Not only that, I'm planning to repeat the Linux-on-SD/microSD experiment on another laptop that I use on a semi-regular basis. I don't do anything on that laptop that would be considered Windows specific either. It's a HP Stream Laptop with 4GB's of RAM that is currently running Windows 10 on a 64GB eMMC drive. To be honest, Linux would be a perfect fit for that laptop, and the Windows 10 install would be fine for that rare time that I need it. With that mentioned, I think I'm going to wrap up my OS's on removable media experiments for now. I've learned a lot, and found out both the capabilities and the limitations of the media in use. The upgraded Acer Aspire isn't the same laptop it was a year ago. This has been a very worthwhile experiment.

Windows On USB/SD Card is still a worthwhile experiment and I will revisit it down the road when I get my hands on a faster SD Card. As a result, there is a YouTube video linked below detailing how to run Windows from a USB device. As noted, the Acer Aspire conforms to USB 2, so a USB 3 port and drive might yield much greater performance. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WeatherStar 4000 Simulator For Windows (Part 1)

Image
  It's time to get the weather forecast, 90's style. A couple of months ago, I reviewed the WeatherStar 4000+ simulator for web-browsers. This simulator, created by Mike Battaglia, is a open-source, on-line simulator of the WeatherStar 4000 hardware used by The Weather Channel during the 1990's. This simulator ran without issue on both Firefox and Chrome on Windows 7 (Home PC) and Firefox on Windows 10 (Dell Optiplex).  It also runs great under Chrome on my Android devices as well. I use the online simulator when I'm on the road.  Now, I'm going to look into the WeatherStar 4000 simulator for Windows offered by Taiganet. This simulator offers a lot of features and can be customized in various ways. When I'm home, I use this program most of the time. Now, there is one notable hardware requirement. First, to run the Windows (and Mac OSX/Linux ports as well) simulator, you will need a computer that supports OpenGL 3.3. My home computer ha...
Read more

Classic Systems Emulated: Windows 95 (Part 1)

Image
  Start Me Up! Windows 95 (Chicago Beta Build 189 released September 1994) running under PCEM What would eventually become Windows 95 was affected by several turn of events that occurred during its development. Windows 95, code-named Chicago, had been several years in the making. Microsoft had already been planning the next version of Windows right after they got 3.1 out the door on March 1992. What would determine the course of the new OS? DOS Compatibility for one as it was still deemed essential at that point. One has to remember that even though Windows 3.0 had been the most successful version of Windows to date, the GUI in general was still a novelty at that point. Most used Windows 3.0 for simple task like typing list, letters, or playing solitaire. Most PC users who needed to work on major projects were still running DOS applications like WordPerfect or Lotus 123. However, the transition to GUI's would begin in earnest.  The 486 processor ...
Read more

Classic Systems Emulated: Windows 3.1 OEMS

Image
  The OEM's Want In On The Action The PC Market of the early 90's was a very competitive one. As such, having a easy-to-use environment was a must for these companies pushing there hardware. Hardware has caught up to software, and as such, it was now time to push the command prompt out of the way for the GUI. Several of these companies spotted opportunities to make  deals with Microsoft to pre-install Windows on there computers. This phenomenon didn't start with 3.1 though. Even in the late 80's, both Compaq and IBM often preinstalled Windows 386 for corporate customers that brought there 386 systems. Windows 3.0 was bundled with a lot of systems too. It was preinstalled on the IBM PS/1 budget PC's and various Tandy models. It came with the Amstrad MegaPC and various other PC's offered by ZDS (Zenith Data Systems) as well.  The number of OEM partners grew with the Windows 3.1 release. Some of them were familiar faces, like Compa...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated :Psion Model 3a Emulated On DOSBox Windows

Image
  Psion 3a and 3c Psion Series 3c Handheld Computer (Wikipedia) Psion 3a As mentioned in the previous articles, the emulators for the Psion 3 exist only on DOSBox. I decided to take the challenge of setting up a emulated configuration. What must one do. There is already a very good guide on the internet titled "PocketBook II emulation..." which is linked below in the article. Highly recommended. Setting up a emulated Psion 3 takes a little bit of effort, but it's possible and is a good exploration of setting up a DOSBox configuration. I'm making the safe assumption that the fast majority of those reading this are using Windows systems, but DOSBox has been ported to Mac OS X and Linux as well, so this guide might work on those systems.  The first thing I did was created a folder called dosbox_psion3 (Folder naming is based on personal preference). Make the following new folders within dosbox_psion3; psion3, a, b, and m. With the f...
Read more

Classic Systems Emulated: OS/2 Version 2.0 On PCEM

Image
  The Arrival Of 32-Bit Power For The Masses The past couple of these PC articles have been very Windows-centric. This isn't a surprise as Windows 3.0 was a major release that made a very massive impact on the marketplace. Windows 3.1 sold 3 million copies in 6 weeks. 1992 was a very different time. Back then, it was possible to request a PC without an operating system. If one did want an OS, they could choose between OS/2, DOS, or the DOS+Windows combination. I've had not forgotten OS/2 in these articles. The 286 versions of OS/2 had already been covered in my articles about the IBM PS/2 family of computers. The messy IBM-Microsoft "divorce" had been covered in detail as well. To quickly recap: Microsoft didn't like the direction that IBM wanted to take OS/2. Microsoft envisioned OS/2 as being the "next-generation" OS, while IBM simply saw the OS as a tool to sell more hardware. OS/2 did terrible in the marketplace. The ...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated - Windows Mobile 5.0

Image
Working title for this post was "But Mama, That's Where The Fun Is!". Appropriate as by the middle 2000's, Windows Mobile was where all the action was at. The sky was only getting brighter for Microsoft as Palm was slowly imploding on itself. With Microsoft's mobile offerings becoming more widespread by the day, the Redmond Giant followed up with the newest version of WM, version 5.0, on May 2005. On the surface, it appears that little changed. However, the biggest change were "under the hood" with the incorporation of the .NET Compact Framework, which is basically the mobile version of .NET. Also, WM 5.0 introduced newer power-saving capabilities which often improved the battery life of devices by as much as 50%. WM backed up everything to flash memory. WinMobile would use a combination of RAM and flash memory to preserve battery life. This wasn't noticeable by the user.  As such, their is no data loss if power is lost.  Windows Media Player was upd...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated : Pocket PC 2000/2002

Image
  Windows CE On The PDA Pocket PC 2002 starting up. For the remainder of the 90's, Microsoft had a tough time gaining a foothold in the handheld market. Windows CE 2.0 was well received on the palmtop PC's. However, that market-share was small compared to there PDA counterpart that were rocking to the tune of PalmOS. The first incarnation of WinCE on the PDA seemed sparse compared to Palm. At this point, the PDA port of Windows CE was re-branded as Windows Mobile. Around this point, Microsoft's fortunes began to change. For the first time, the Palm platform had that "Oh Crap!" moment when Compaq released the iPAQ in April 2000. The PDA came with the new Windows Pocket PC 2000 operating system. This version of Windows CE was specifically geared towards PDA's in particular. The iPAQ line of PDA's became must own devices for those that wanted the latest and greatest. As how Compaq made IBM look silly in the 80's and 90's...
Read more

Old Hardware Emulated :Einstein emulating the Apple Newton (Part 3)

Image
  NewtonOS Android in Action! Einstein emulating the Newton Messagepad on a Amazon Fire HD7 tablet. Einstein Seriously, did you not expect me to run a OS designed for a classic handheld device on a modern tablet!? It's interesting running Einstein on a PC, but I want to try this platform out on a handheld that was similar in form-factor to the original device. Einstein had been ported to Android as well. It's not as recent as the current builds available for iOS, MacOS, and Ubuntu Linux, but it works well enough. Running the emulator means doing a few things before hand, like loading the Android package, ROM, and other needed files. The apk file that I downloaded was "einstein.05.01.2013.apk", which can be found at a archived version of the code.Google.com page (link posted below). You will also need a ROM file named "717006" that needs to be placed in the "/sdcard/Downloads/Einstein/" directory of your Androi...
Read more

Classic Games Emulated: Revisiting NFS High Stakes Modding

Image
  Modding On The Mind! As anyone who's read my NFS:HS article or watching my uploads on YouTube, one can tell that they're two things that I'm a fan of: NFS:HS and Virtualization. I like contained environments that allow me to run beloved games from the past on far more powerful configurations. It only seemed natural for me to embark on the journey of getting NFS:HS running under VMware Player. I had a original copy of the game on CD-ROM which was installed on my guest setup. The guest configuration had two cores allocated to it, 2GB's of RAM, and 3D acceleration via my Nvidia GTX 950. The guest OS running was Windows 7 32-bit. After installing HS, I copied the patch, and started to burn rubber. After that, I duplicated the game folder so I could have two installations: one stock and another one for mod. Within the NFS:HS folder, their are various directories. The "DATA/CARS" folder has both the racing and traffic cars. The first t...
Read more

OS/2 Warp 4

Image
(Any blogpost where I don't have to cover politics is a win in my books!) OS/2 Warp 4 was a very noble endeavor. It was IBM's statement to the world to demonstrate there commitment to the OS/2 operating system. However, when it arrived in 1996, OS/2 Warp 4 was dead on arrival. A lot had happened between the launch of Warp 3 and Warp 4, with the biggest of them being the arrival of Windows 95. Microsoft, making the most of their OEM connections, started to lock OS/2 out of the OEM markets prior to the launch of Windows 95. With threats of either not receiving the latest Windows or paying much higher license fees, many OEM's relented to Microsoft's pressure. Warp 3 struggled against Windows 3.1 along with the soon-to-be-tidal wave that would be Windows 95. Not only that, Microsoft had a vendetta against Big Blue for previous acts.  Lotus 123 For OS/2 Warp 4 Faced with accusations that Microsoft incorporated OS/2 source code into Windows 3.x which would have violated the j...
Read more