Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Vixta, Fedora Core 8, are all Free, and very competent Operating Systems, with full access to 20 thousand applications, programs, and games.

livecdlist.com has 315 Live CD Distros. Distrowatch.com has most, also.

If you haven’t tried out at least one Linux LiveCDrom, you are missing the curiosity gene.

If you aren’t running at least one Linux distro on a ’spare’ computer, you don’t have kids, and you are also deficient the self reliance gene.

If you aren’t using a Linux or other Unix clone, then you must really enjoy the masochistic Microsoft Virus collection.

There’s something else you could add in here: Office 2007 is a disaster. My company tried it on a few dozen machines and ended up reverting to office 2003; I’ve had it for four months on brand new notebook (it came pre-installed) and I hate it. I can’t believe what a giant step backwards this was — from the .docx format (requiring you to save it as a 2003 .doc if you want to be backwards compatible, thus undercutting the reason for upgrading at all,) to the completely counter-intuitive ribbon. I miss the menus. I loathe the interface. People like me (early adopters/family geeks) are telling everyone not to upgrade. It’s not worth it in price, it’s not worth it in the cost of time to learn it, it’s not worth the aggravation. This is a giant misstep on MS’s part.

Boy am I going to get slammed for this, but I actually like Vista.

Don’t get me wrong, I have had many headaches and re-installs of XP whilst I calmed down and wanted to throw the computer out the nearest window!

But being a patient (read bloodyminded) soul I persisted and now my Shuttle is purring like a kitten without a problem. (Why oh why did I just say that!)

After being stuck with a lemon in the form of XP x64 which even the Microsoft site doesn’t recognize as XP, my hopes rested on Vista being my cure to x64 operating. And surprisingly its worked at last.

Every install had a crash of some description, and I really couldn’t pinpoint what was doing it. Finally I found that Avast was having a hard time with Vista Home Premium x64 and swapped it for AVG. The purrs started being heard. Then, because I was either tired or really didn’t care any more, I put my display drivers on before my sound (Because Vista had generic drivers for my Realtek HD sound) and hey presto we are in business. Then just a bit of fiddling under the bonnet with niceties, as well as the power management stuff and I have a system that is an improvement on XP x64.

Now I’m not going to jinx things by saying I’ll never have another problem, but as far as I can see everything is working tip top now, and really all it took is a bit of patience and fiddling, just like wearing in new shoes. The driver aspect really surprised me, as I haven’t had the order of driver installation problem since Win 98 (pre SE) days, and that bit of geek junk was long ago filed under not needed, but maybe because of the lacklustre support of driver writers this old problem may be resurfacing, because this and Avast are the only changes I made and everything now seems tickity boo.

Just a though, maybe it will give people an idea. I haven’t gone the whole hog and upgraded Office from 2003, but I have OneNote 2007 and it seems to like everything.

Now we just need a fix for the sloooooow file transfer time (40 seconds to move a 5mb file the other day) and we’ll be in business.

I’m just an old man that loves to fool with computers…..

My old machine burned up back in Feb and instead of building a new machne I decided to buy one off of the shelf. Boy that was a mistake. I got a very fast machine loaded with Vista Home Premium because the store didn’t have one with XP on it. I have had so many problems with this operating system that I am now building a machine like I should of done before. There is just so many thing wrong with this operating system that I think that Microsoft should offer a way to put Windows XP on these machines. One of my biggest gripes is my TV card won’t work no matter what I do and now I can’t copy old movies and edit them to watch. My scanner won’t work right and one of my biggest gripes is in the Control Panel the dumb heads from Microsoft had to go and change the Add/Remove icon over to Programs and Features. Now why in the world would they do that. The ordinary people already have enough problems adding and removing programs and most of the ones that I know still don’t know how to do it.

Well my parts for my new super fast computer will be here in a couple of days and I can’t hardly wait. I’ll be like a kid in the candy store when it get here. I’m going to reformat my old new computer and sell it. It’s a dual core machine and very fast so I should be able to sell it pretty quick.

Guess I’m gonna get slammed too since I like Vista as well. I’ve been running it as my primary OS since the beta days and other than some issues early after the official release last January with drivers and some software compatibility, I haven’t had any problems. I’ve got Ultimate and I have to admit that I didn’t have to pay for it since my son and his partner are Microsoft partners and I got it for $0 so I couldn’t complain much anyway. But I do like it.

Did Microsoft make a mistake in the marketing of Vista and trying to force feed it to the public? Of course they did. Nobody wants to have something shoved down their throat. But I also remember that when I was still working I was running Windows 2000 on my PC at work long after XPSP2 had been released and it wasn’t until nearly 2 years after SP2 that the company finally started moving to XP at all.

I’m a firm believer in the phrase “you can satisfy all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can never satisfy all of the people all of the time.” I also believe in the phrase, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” In the case of Vista, I think the “squeaky wheel” are those that don’t like Vista or anything from Microsoft.

Oh yeah. I’ve also got Office 2007 and haven’t had any problems with it either.

I have to say that John hit the nail on the head in quite a few ways. I am running XP Pro on all the machines in my shop, (approx. 100 workstations) and the upgrade to Vista is impossible for me for several reasons. I can’t get Vista until there are several third party applications that go to Vista compatible versions. I’m not talking the big name apps here, I am talking little known high dollar applications like Extol Integrator and Solidworks. These types of applications are expensive and are produced by smaller companiew that don’t have hundreds of developers to throw at the coding tasks of porting to Vista. Another reason I am not switching at this time is the expense. Sure, we could phase out XP by purchasing replacement machines with Vista, but the cost of replacing our current antivirus solution (at about $35 a seat) and the cost of upgrading to Vista compatible versions on our other software ends up being over $100,000 just to support an OS that doesn’t really do anything for us. Vista may be fine for home users, and to play the latest Microsoft Direct X 10 games you may want it, but for business it just makes no sense at all. Microsoft’s bread and butter is really the business user, and they missed the mark completely.

M$ is getting rich from pre-loaded pc’s. At this point, people simply have no choice. Dell’s Ubuntu-loaded systems cost MORE than Windows systems because the crapware companies don’t pay a kickback for having their garbage installed.

What’s going to have to happen is that people are going to have to get mad enough to rebel. I finally got mad enough to install Ubuntu (and I love it). But I’m a geek. A regular Joe will probably put up with and eventually get used to Vista, rather than tackle a new paradigm. Sad, but true.

M$’s only hope to regain over-the-counter sales of O/S’s (if they give a crap) is to keep the GUI consistent, like Linux’s KDE-Gnome-etc. environments. Forcing users to learn a new GUI every few years is simply insane, and horrible customer service.

Linuxiac, although I’ve got kids, I’m not running a linux distro on a spare machine, precisely because I don’t have time to try new things (eventhough I would like to). When you have kids, you only have time to get things done, and 99% of them I get done on my mac.

The odd non-PC app forced me to buy a couple of WinPCs over the last 15 years.
Now with Intel on Macs, I’m throwing away my PC and one of ‘em new iMacs will be sitting next to my Mac G5 and Powerbook G4.
And with CrossOver Mac to Wine more and more Win apps without a M$ licenese, I will hammer the last nail on the coffin for M$’s presence in my familie’s desktop.

Sweet!!

Everyone, thanks for the comments - I’ll have more on this when my broadband connection gets restored. And a really good rant about Verizon - customer service - not the actual product.