Before leaving the computer I just press WinKey+L.

Now, having to log in -again- when I return is slow and error-prone, especially while sipping coffee. The solution is obviously to use the same software to auto-login a soon as it detects the presence of a user.

Thanks for that info. Ok, so now I know that people who buy these cars are ... peculiar. And I shall avoid them.

I was purely going for the price aspect and not the contractual.

What school system in any country teaches their kids, "Hey, so... we really fucked up a lot back then."

My schools never did as far as I can remember (American here). I doubt that's changed in the 5 years since I've been outta high school.

Are you sure?? What does Limbaugh or Glenn Beck say about it?

Right... but all of that is contingent upon the first sentence:

The point is that the normal story is not the true story, and that once you hear the full story, it

Make sense?

Hey, can us 'old timers' keep our old, ancient, (straight forward) browser interface? If the same mindset goes to other fields, I'm sure its going to be just as much fun to move the gas, gear shift, brake pedal, turn signal, radio, to different parts of the car each year they come out! Because we have so little to do these days, its fun to relearn the same stuff over and over!

That's pretty much what I'm considering, here.

I spent far more time futzing with my Mac to get it working the way I like than I do with KDE. And it still wasn't anywhere close to what I'm used to.

Where to begin?

• I can't remember the last time I've used a scanner.
• Digital cameras work fine. "Out-of-the-box" fine.
• I've had exactly one Linux driver issue with this computer, and easily ten or more Windows driver issues.

Your stereotype isn't entirely unfounded, but it's getting a bit old and often dead wrong.

Regardless, I think the point stands. If I had a Linux computer -- or BSD, or Solaris, or Plan9, or Haiku, or OS 9, or Win2k, or anything except OS X or Windows XP+ -- then iTunes is not free, it's an expensive upgrade.

So, where'd your "it's free" argument go? You instead dropped to, "Oh, well, nothing's free." I think you've made my point for me.

I have a fast metabolism and have trouble keeping weight on. I was way too skinny most of my life, never could gain weight. When I was on Paxil I gained 40 pounds and was actually a few pounds too heavy, but in the three or fours years since I've been off of them I've lost 20 pounds while trying to keep it on.

I have the same card, the 512mb x1800XT, and currently all the games I want to play this card does fine on. I can't justify a newer faster more efficient card until there is a game I want to play it can't max out cause it still does a great job. Maybe SCII will be that game.

Welcome to real life software development. All complex software performs unexpectedly.

Emulation is difficult because hardware specs are often not available and when available do not perfectly describe the actual hardware.

> Updates

This is a symptom of a more general problem: Windows doesn't have anything I would describe as a package manager. Okay, there's "add or remove Windows components", but quite frankly it reminds me of the early nineties, and not in a good way.

> Back-ups: Using linux I can back up /etc, /var and /home
> and the package list. That's it

This much better on Windows than it used to be. These days you don't have to worry about applications storing user files and preferences in places like the root directory and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32, so really all you have to back up is the Documents and Settings folder, which you can think of as /etc and /home and /tmp all rolled into one.

(Yes, if you have to do a reinstall/restore you're going to have to manually install all your applications again, one by one. But that's another symptom of the lack of package management, which we've already covered.)

(Err, and if you're running a *server*, there are some other things to back up too. But, to be honest, if you're using Windows as a server OS it's probably because your line-of-business software requires it, and you probably have a support contract from the vendor, and you probably got ARCserve as part of the deal. If you're using Windows as a server OS *without* a vendor support contract, you're more of a masochist than I took you for. So let's confine the discussion to desktop and workstation scenarios.)

> Bluetooth: a bluetooth USB dongle "just works" in linux.
I don't know anything about Bluetooth (well, okay, I know that it's a short-distance wireless communication protocol of some kind, but that's all), so I can't comment on that, except to note that normal users don't mess with it anyway.

> Software installation

Yeah, we already covered the lack of package management.

And yeah, it *is* a significant point. But you seem to have enumerated it as points 1, 2, *and* 4. That's really not fair.

I surely do appreciate the value of a good package manager, but really, if that were all Windows needed, it would be a pretty good product. I'd probably use it on my own desktop, if that were the only major thing wrong with it.