Interested in Linux - Ubuntu vs Fedora

Well, having been a Microsoft Windows user all my life, I have never explored UNIX or LINUX all that much. I have been curious but never felt compelled enough to go through the trouble of installing either or exploring them.

But, now I feel compelled and more than curious. Why ? Here's why:

1) Having worked on a Mac at work/office, I now see that it's not so difficult to move to another operating system. (It is another thing that I don't greatly appreciate the OS X and given a choice would any day still prefer Windows)

2) Having worked on the mac, and having worked on the Terminal on Mac, on which I try out UNIX scripts, I am really interested to get LINUX installed on my computer so I can play around with a few scripts.

3) Vista!! (Yes, one word sums up the frustrations and anger of millions of users world-wide, who have begun wondering if Microsoft has got its head in its arse.)

Now that I am interested in installing LINUX on my machine, I was wondering which one of them (oh, there are so many!!) to install. Finally I narrowed down to Fedora and Ubuntu. While the LINUX community I am sure is still split in opinion as to which is better, me being just a lay user and not a freak, decided that I will decide only on very basic parameters. Like my whim!! :)

So I considered it, and decided on Ubuntu. I am downloading Ubuntu as I write this post. It's amazing how things have changed in the one year in which I have had no access to a PC/Internet. Now, you can download these over torrents :) which is a relief!! because I always hated trying to download 600 MB files and getting stuck at 500 MB!!

I am also downloading Wubi and it sounds pretty cool. I think once I try out Ubuntu and feel that it's worth installing on my machine, I'll go ahead and create a partition and do it. As of now, I am relying on Wubi, which even does that thing of allowing you to choose between Windows and Ubuntu at startup :) (Dual boot)

More on Ubuntu ....later.

Laptop Cooling Pad

Having bought the new Dell Studio XPS 16, laptop, which overheats like hell (for whatever reason, only god knows), I had to find a solution to this heating problem.

I was looking at The IT Depot website, when I found the following laptop cooling pads:

1) Belkin (F5L001 and F5L001-BLK -without hubs, F5L025qe - with hubs)
2) Targus (AWE12AP - with hubs and two fans)
3) Cooler Master (Notepal Infinite - with hubs, Notepal X1 - without hubs)

After much consideration and being tempted to buy Belkin, I finally settled for the Cooler Master Notepal X1. Things that influenced my decision

i) Mine is a 16" laptop. The belkin coolers looked rather small, though they would easily fit inside a laptop bag.
ii) It had varying speed fan.
iii) Belkin was more portable, but then I don't plan to carry around my laptop and the cooler. For people considering to do so, I would suggest Belkin as they are sleeker.
iv) I could have easily paid slightly more for the ones which had USB hubs, but I reckon I won't require 4 more USB ports when I already have 3 on my notebook.

There were laptop stands by Allsop, which really really sucked. Who in their right mind would want to buy them ?

Transferring Files over Ethernet

Here's the deal. I wanted to transfer about 25GB of data from one laptop to another.

One of the laptops is an HP Pavillion dv2000 and the other is a DELL Studio XPS 16"

Both computers are running Vista and I connected the two laptops with a CAT 5E patch cable. (length 1 m)

The files are getting transferred at ~ 375 KB/sec which is really really slow.

I checked the network cards on both the machines and they are as following

1) HP pavillion dv2000 - Marvell Yukon 88E8039 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Connection
2) Dell Studio XPS 16" - Broadcom Netlink Gigabit Ethernet

I am unable to understand as to why the transfer is so slow. I would have expected much faster transfer rates.

Madly googling to try and find out why, but most people who are faced with this problem are using some sort of router or another, which I am not.

Oh and btw, Windows Vista sucks!! Just waiting to get my free upgrade to Windows 7