What about trickle down economics? While it has surely affected the 99-percenters, it was hardly in a positive way. Not everything that benefits the wealthy makes its way to the common person.

Yes, you've forgotten your fucking manners. No reason to be a doooooooosh.

That's awesome! I think my 386 came with a really large 40MB drive and I wanted so badly get a CDROM until I found out you still needed drive space to run the games on them. I only remember because that was really when I started to get into computers on my own. I was quite a hardware geek back in those days. I bought that p166 back in 1996 I think, and it was a really expensive rig looking at hardware nowadays.

Except a PIII-100 did not exist. at 100mhz you would have been talking about a 486dx4 or a Pentium 100mhz machine. PIII ran from 450mhz-1.4ghz IIRC. However, if you are talking about bus speed, then yes, P3 did use a 100mhz-133mhz bus speed. However, when talking about a P3 (or even Pentium 1), a 200mb hard drive would have been tiny. When I bought my Pentium 166mhz machine it came with a (pricey) 4.3gb scsi drive. I believe I even had a 500MB drive hooked up to my 386. And I sure did not have 96MB of RAM, more like 4MB. Those were the days, just not quite like how you remember them...

You can. But people will freak out when that checkbox would say "Linux + $80". They would think "But Linux is free". While it is a free OS, the OEM wouldn't get subsidies from bloatware providers which help subsidies the cost of the computer.

That is a different issue. I agree it is not good that Microsoft is allowed to create predatory OEM licensing agreements. I would be in favor of regulations that would prevent MS from making such contracts.

Do you regularly remote in to your home network? Do you connect out to a server somewhere? If not, then setting up a VPN isn’t going to give you much (well technically it won’t give you anything). If so, your specific use case (which was not provided) matters.

As for software, one of:

- Throw your linux on there (I like Gentoo hardened) and roll your own with OpenVPN and other assorted tools (I like shorewall as an iptables frontend). - pfSense if you’ve got a decent box and want bells and/or whistles - m0n0wall if you want something light but functional

You might also want to consider routerboard, it’s cool shit and reasonably priced.

If it worked, it worked. If it didn't, it went back to the store. The buyer wasn't obliged to diagnose hardware and software conflicts or borked system installs --- or pay for the privilege of having these problems solved for him

Linux, BSD, other open source solutions are awesome, and if I am a hardware vendor I am going to build hardware that supports it because it's awesome. Not because I've been strong armed into it by a the courts. Likewise, I don't want to have to sell Windows because I've been strong-armed into it via Microsoft's predatory OEM licensing agreements

A href="http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=linux+pc+vendor">Here you go.

Here is my question, if the Free Software Foundation and the open source guys believe so much in having free software on PCs, why not start up a company that only sells PCs and Laptops with free software installed? Why is it the established vendors problem to solve? Begin by launching a fund raising campaign on Kickstarter, find a hardware supplier on Alibaba, and open a web storefront. It's not that hard...

So practically speaking, unless you hate MS with a passion, it is in your own interested to get the basically free version of Windows, do a wipe and reinstall, and go on with your life, as pretty much every tech savvy person has been doing for decades.

Normal people don't like that though. Let's say that you try and sell product A to somebody that requires product B to function. This person has neither used nor ever had interest in A or B. Most people aren't interested in one or the other. Normal people want an A+B product where somebody else has worked out all of the compatibility problems.