John Cartmell wrote:

Avoid Microsoft. Their OSs are designed to make you have to upgrade at
too-short intervals. I'm using a 10+ year old computer. It has had a new
processor, new hard drives, more memory and OS upgrades. I've added the means
to allow networking, USB, &c. But in that time you'll have purchased 4-6 new
Windows machines at far greater expense. I'm limited by speed (though it went
far faster than the equivalent Windows machines when new and when it had a new
processor added) and by colours/resolution (32 thousand colours is its maximum
at a reasonable resolution). But it still runs all the software of the last 10
years. Of course I now have an upgrade - but that also runs all the old
software even if some has to be done through a form of emulation - and the two
will happily run in parallel. I have no expectation of the old machine being
pensioned off for another 3-5 years (or more). That may be exceptional; but
your expectation of PCs is exceptionally bad.

You're missing the point entirely. I'm not a Windows fan, but I *have*
to use Windows, at least some of the time. When I can get away with
using other OSes, I do. I'll explain.

At work: All of the web work I do *must* be tested on multiple browsers
on Windows. This is despite the fact that it works happily
cross-platform. You simply can't guarantee that stuff will look/work as
intended without this testing.

But - our servers run Linux and FreeBSD. These OSes are great for
servers, and do an excellent job.


At home: All of the games that I like playing will only run under
Windows, and *require* fast hardware. That's not the fault of the OS,
it's the way the games work (heavy graphics, huge numbers of game
components).


--
Grunff