Win 7 or Ubuntu?

I recently assembled a new PC for home use. My old PC was a Celeron with an on-board graphics card. I had it running dual boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu (KDE), and was using Kubuntu as my primary OS. But it was woefully inadequate at keeping up with the demands of today's websites: CPU usage was almost always high whenever I had Firefox running for long. And memory was the next major resource constraint.

Here are the parts I used for my new PC -

• Quad core Intel i5 CPU
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• nVidia GeForce 9800 graphics card
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Gigabyte micro ATX motherboard

• 780W power supply 
• 2GB DDR3 RAM 

Newegg.com was my primary resource for researching the configuration and it worked quite well. My motherboard choice was restricted by two other constraints: it had to have EIDE support and its form factor had to be micro ATX. Next, on to assembling the PC: after stumbling through the initial steps, I found the process was really not that hard. I did get some very useful tips when I was stuck by calling up the respective parts' technical support.

The next decision to be made was regarding the OS: I had already decided to install both Windows 7 and Kubuntu, so the question really was which one would be my primary OS. After playing around with each for a few hours, I actually found Windows 7 to be more light weight. While most of the changes in Windows 7 may be cosmetic, I must admit that at first glance, it feels more slick and snappy compared to Kubuntu 9. Plus there are applications that still don't "just work" on Linux, e.g. getting Flash player to work on a 64-bit machine. So Windows 7 it is.

Update: Though the experience of putting together a PC was enlightening in some ways, I don't feel like I learnt a whole lot that I might find useful as a software/applications engineer. For instance, it was good to learn about EIDE vs SATA drives, or ATX and micro ATX motherboards, but the next time, I think I might just buy a PC off the shelf.