Ruined the tool budget.... Bought a PC

[Mike Circo]

Well my 7 year old 933mhz 384mb 40gig Dell with the 17" CRT wasn't doing it any longer. More stuff wouldn't run than would. So I took advantage of a good Best Buy package and got a Gateway with an NICE 19" flat panel monitor (that alone is worth the changeover)

BUT...

It has that goofy Vista OS. Overall not bad, but it is a case of the dumbing down of America. EVERYTHING is a graphic. What?... we have suddenly become incapable of reading and must depend on cartoon graphics to show us the way? The "wow" factor lasted about 20 minutes, now I'm already bored of all the flashy pictures, graphics and colors and have already begun to turn stuff off. With a little luck, I'll be back to XP performance in a couple of weeks.

On the flip side, it did load up and configure itself well. Adding hardware is a breeze, even easier than with XP. I haven't yet tried to hook up my 7 year old printer yet, but can't imagine that it will be an issue either.

Oh... I HATE HATE HATE the new prettied up graphics on the games (Spider Solitare mostly). Really hard to concentrate on the meaning of the card when there are 30 colors on every screen.

Just a vent.

Overall the OS is fine, the change is inevitible as XP will be unsupported in a couple of years. The computer is very quiet and powerful (Athlon X2 DualCore 5000+ 2gig 320gig drive) with only a junky mouse (already replaced with my old wireless version) and a hard to find CD eject button to complain about.

Just a report of my day.

[Bart Leetch]

I wish Linux would make it easier so we don't have to be nerds to set it up & run it & it would configure its self for printers & scanners & cameras etc. I would like to not support Microsoft just like every few years they change systems & quit supporting me with their old system. I am tired of paying & paying & paying just to do the few simple things I do with a computer.

[Steven Wilson]

Bart, every commercial software company orphans old products after a couple of release cycles. Do you expect Microsoft to fully support (fix bugs, patchs, etc) every release of their OS's since DOS 1.0? You could not afford any software if every release had to be supported forever. Our company is generally not a new adopter of every upgrade that comes down the road but eventually we end up dragging our clients through upgrades once a piece of software they use is no longer supported. It's too costly to run your operations on orphaned code. BTW, Unix and its varients follow the same model (anybody support Unix for Apollo workstations anymore?). Microsoft is fairly reasonable in how many releases they will support before they drop a product and are quite good at providing developer help if you find a shop stopper in upgrading your commercial products (i.e. software your firm develops).

[Matt Meiser]

anybody support Unix for Apollo workstations anymore?

Does anyone even support the hardware? I had a customer with and Apollo system running a quality system a few years ago. They litreally had to tap the hard drive with a hammer to get it to spin up if the power went out for longer than the UPS system could support. That was the ONLY reaon they took that system down. We were developing the replacement system and there were some tense moments, such as during the big blackout a few years ago.

With respect to the software, imagine if MS tried to maintain support for Windows 95 with all the new hardware and software that's come out since then. They only dropped support for Windows 98 about 2 years ago. I'd call that pretty fair. Now if you are talking support with respect to newer apps being able to run on the older OS's, thats another story. Each new OS has added new features that allow us to do more with applicaiton software. Adding those features back to old OS's would be expensive if not impossible. Also, if you think it is bad now how many patches are necessary, imagine what it would be like if they added a feature to each of the prior OS's and then had to patch that. Not to mention the fact that a PC which is running Windows 95 may not even have the "umph" to run some of the newer features.

I've dabbled in Linux a few times over the past 12 years. Each time, things have changed considerably since the last time I played with it. The most recent time was this year and things have gotten a lot easier, but still way too hard for the average home user to support, unless you run OS X on a Mac. I'm running Ubuntu as a home file server on some pretty old hardware successfully.

I've softented considerably on Apple the past few years and would seriously consider a dual-boot Mac for my next PC. However I wouldn't do without Windows as there are still a few things that I would have us it for--Cut List Plus, for example.

[glenn bradley]

I wish Linux would make it easier so we don't have to be nerds to set it up & run it & it would configure its self for printers & scanners & cameras etc. I would like to not support Microsoft just like every few years they change systems & quit supporting me with their old system. I am tired of paying & paying & paying just to do the few simple things I do with a computer.

Now, now. Unix-like systems ARE user friendly . . they just haven't found any friendly users yet. ;-)

[glenn bradley]

Congrats on the machine and good luck with the OS. We haven't certified it for use at the University yet but folks have it. If it matures like XP it'll be OK somewhere close to the end of its lifespan.

All kidding aside, congrats. There's nothing like a nice new fast machine to put a smile on your face.

[Randal Stevenson]

I wish Linux would make it easier so we don't have to be nerds to set it up & run it & it would configure its self for printers & scanners & cameras etc. I would like to not support Microsoft just like every few years they change systems & quit supporting me with their old system. I am tired of paying & paying & paying just to do the few simple things I do with a computer.

I have an old PII 400 Suse 9.0 box that was my Samba server. Only reason I shut it down, was I needed more hard drive space and came across a bargain. With Linux, most of the cameras I have seen are just a USB device, or you take the memory out and insert it into a reader (again, like a usb device). Printers and scanners however really might be the issue for you, as there are several that are "win" centric. They use the pc's brains as hardware, instead of having internal hardware, to make them cheaper to manufacture and sell. linuxprinting.org would be a good site to check yours.
While it is easier to install and use since I started playing with it, the two general reasons that most people can't switch are 1. Email attachments in a proprietary MS format (like WMV) and 2. Some proprietary piece of software (like games, or some specialized software).

When your ready to try it, you might check out the boot from cd/dvd disks.