So perhaps your plans for a brand new PC are on hold right now, or at least until some serious sales kick in. (Be sure to check www.slickjdeals.net for some gems, BTW!)

But some people in your family are just itching for something new.  

Satisfy that urge, have some fun, and do no harm to your existing PC with Puppy Linux. This magnificent mongrel started life as an experiment to see how small an operating system could get, and also how to squeeze in many useful programs. The goal was to make it all so small that everything loaded 100% into computer memory, which means the PC would not access the hard drive, except to save documents or other created files. The hard drive could be completely removed and file storage could still be handled by a USB "thumb drive."

Puppy is now at version 4.2 and there are (as is the case with everything Linux) several variations offering increasing degrees of complexity. But the basic Puppy achieves the goal of quietly running the OS, word processing, web browsing and much  more without disturbing the hard drive.

To get and run puppy, you download the .ISO file from the offical site (see below). An .ISO file is a CD image that burns a complete copy of the system to a writeable CD. You will need an ISO burner such as CDBurnerXP pro or any other one to do this.  If you don't have one, do a search for 100% FREEWARE sites and locate one.

Once you have the CD burned, pop it in the CD drive and reboot. Most computers will boot from a CD first, ignoring the operating system on the hard drive. If yours doesn't, you may have to look carefully at what is on your screen as your PC starts up. There should be some notice about changing the setup by pressing F12 or some other key as the PC boots, but BEFORE the Windows program starts. In the setup program you will find the "boot order" and you can tell the PC to look at the CD drive first.  This can always be changed back later.

Puppy will load into the computer memory, and then your screen will show a Windows-like screen.  To the left are some of basic items on the screen. Note you do NOT have use the install program unless you want the system loaded to your hard drive. This somewhat defeats the purpose of Puppy as other distributions of Linux, such as Ubuntu, are more complete for those who desire a hard drive based system.

There is a setup program to quickly determine your language, time and other niceties. You can also set up your internet connection and your printer. The file that holds this configuration is saved on your hard drive (or USB stick) so you don't have to go do this again next time you boot from the CD.

Once you are using the system, is possible to add more "packages" from the free Puppy archives that expand your system with more free programs. These additonal packages are stored on your hard drive, but will also load into memory upon booting the CD.

From within Puppy, it is also possible to burn ANOTHER complete CD that includes the extra packages you have added.

Puppy runs well on machines that are not the brand-new-latest. Since it is not using a lot of hardware access, the principle snappiness comes from the fact that all the data to run Puppy and programs are in RAM and the programs are also relatively compact.  

Since you can also access your hard drive, Puppy is handy to have around if your Windows OS crashes and you want to at least copy your files to another place before you erase the hard drive and start all over. But even for day-to-day use, the system is fast and fun to use.  

This page was created running Puppy and using Kompozer, a Linux web page creation program.
More info on Puppy is found at www.puppylinux.org