Have you checked out VueScan? Works with an amazing range of scanners.

Others, because it still works and they have no reason to waste money on a new machine. I know at least two such people. Me? I have WinXP Pro in a Xen DomU, just in case I need something windowsy. It's always on, and I connect to it using RDP over an SSH tunnel. Sure, I rarely use it, but it's there should I need it and it's a better solution than having a XP VM on each of my Linux machines.

At work I have a Win7 VM in VirtualBox, it is horribly, horribly slow. The XP VM on the same VirtualBox host, is snappy and quick.

XP might be dead, but it's makes a rather well preserved zombie.

You, as an individual, are not statistically relevant, even if what you describe is the actual truth. I say that last bit because infants, as soon as they are born, start sucking up language from their parents / caretakers, and I cannot really imagine you growing up in a total vacuum.

I do tend to agree most people learn best from people, because of the simple reason that there is so much evidence all around us that supports that claim. It is wired into us to mimic and learn from the people in our environment.

You can have all the laws of physics explain how things move etc, but how will they ever explain this consciousness?

May I introduce you to the concept of "argument from ignorance". It might be well that it can be perfectly explained by natural laws, just you and me are not (yet) able to.

I can't even prove beyond all doubt that others experience this phenomenon and are conscious. And I can't prove my consciousness to others. I just have to take it by faith that these "imaginary friends" called "you" and "I" exist.

If you go the solipsism route, nothing is certain any more. Even those physical laws you say explain how things move (etc), become totally uncertain in a solipsistic worldview. After all, it could all be just your mind and nothing truly exists.

You could use all 4 SATA ports for HDDs, and install using a USB optical drive or stick when needed (which won't be very often..)

I suggested that. Cumbersome when working on big machines, apparently.

Others such as Eli Lily or the UK Gov Dept of Pensions really don't need so many addresses

Someone in the UK government pointed that out recently - it turns out that "Dept of Pensions" allocation is actually used across most of the government as some sort of VPN extranet with various external contractors. Apparently, since they all use different RFC1918 blocks internally, they can't all be VPNed into any single RFC1918 block: they needed a globally-unique block for that purpose.

British Telecom uses the 30.0.0.0/8 block for managing all their customer modems - that block is actually allocated to the US DoD, but they don't allow external access to it anyway, so there's nothing to stop you using that block internally yourself as long as you don't need to communicate with any other networks using the same trick. Better than wasting an entire /8 of global address space just for internal administrative systems - or a /9, like Comcast grabbed back in 2010.

My inner geek - who cares about efficiency - would love to see all the legacy blocks revoked. I'm sure the DoD could use 10/8 instead of 30/8 quite easily for their non-routed block; the universities could easily fit in a /16 instead of a /8, or smaller with a bit of NAT. Still, we should be moving to IPv6 instead now: give each university and ISP a /48, or /32 for big complex networks needing multiple layers. I just have a nasty feeling we're in for a long time of CGNAT spreading instead - where we currently have ISPs that don't offer static IP addresses, in a few years they'll be refusing to issue anything other than a NATted 100.64/16 address.

I'm a Linux person. Doesn't mean I don't keep myself informed about Mac matters and Windows matters. Sure, I openly tell people I will not support them if they are on Windows *any* version. Get OS X or Linux and I'll help you. Otherwise find someone else.

Well, as I'm a Mac person these days, I've swapped out those sorts of issues for the ones that Apple produce. ;) About the only thing I really miss from Windows is the certainty of knowing when the next lot of security updates are due - at the moment, they're so slack they make Adobe look on-the-ball.

Well, the first thing any serious IT person does after a service pack is slipstream it. So, really, you've only got to blame yourself on this one.

It was IE8. You start off with IE6, even after slipstreaming. I think. I didn't bother testing. I could try another day. I already killed the VM.

...yeah, if I've gotten a slipstreamed install disc with SP3 on it, I could have saved myself a lot of time when I did the same experiment. *shrug*

Out of interest, which version of IE did it have after install completed? I see you were prompted to upgrade to IE8, but my memory is hazy on whether IE7 was ever included on later XP install discs.

PuTTY has an installer. Has had it for ages.