Agreed. Proliant FTW! Oh wait, HP is a bunch of fuckers too.

Wow, you can copy and paste.

You didn't do a quick google before throwing down money on a used security device? This is similar to picking up a used spam appliance for $100 and demanding a free subscription to updated signatures.

Sorry dude, those signatures aren't written by the signature writing security fairy on top of twinkle toe mountain. People are paid to do it and that money has to come from a stable business model.

Don't like it? Build up something using open source and roll with it, nobody is going to stop you and you should probably work it into a distributable ISO and share with the rest of the world for free. But for the love of god, don't whine about companies who let you know up front what subscription rates are for their appliances. IF YOU DONT LIKE OR NEED IT DON'T FUCKING BUY IT.

Apologies, but sometimes you have to type in caps to remind people everything on the goddamned planet isn't going to be free and served to them on a silver platter. :)

Perhaps you should crack a window. The air in your mother's basement must be getting high carbon dioxide levels today.

That's not a Microsoft issue. That's the responsibility of companies selling the systems with Windows installed. For instance, if you get a Dell or HP box with a Win7 to XP downgrade installed, you'll get a patched up copy of XP SP3 on your new system. You won't get the first press of XP's gold image from years ago with no service packs or patches.

Geeze ppl.. Where do you come up with this crap?

It's logic alright, albeit very flawed.

Just so you know, there is no "one install limit" on any Microsoft license. That would be ridiculous. There is a OEM license which is the tightest, allowing activation on a single motherboard, and requires a call to their WGA helpdesk for revalidation if your motherboard "failed" (ie, upgraded your hardware and want to be sneaky and get your system license moved over to the new one). If you are just doing the old Nuke n Pave, well, this doesn't affect any MS license. You'll still have the same hardware, thus will pass activation when the system has finished reinstalling.

But, the big one here.. There are no OEM system-bound licenses under their academic licenses, so I think you are trying to tell a tall tale to FUD Microsoft and fit in with the Linux crowd. Academic, by nature is loose enough to remove a license from one system and install on another since it's intended for lab environments, experimenting, etc.

If this is how you decide which hardware is best for a user, then I feel sorry for the people you build computers for. Microsoft, ATI, Nvidia, Logitech, Intel have all done shitty things but I don't intentionally give my clients sub-par configurations over personal, short-sighted grudges.

The only Nvidia card costing $500 is the GTX295, well at least for the market we are discussing. It's still quicker and slicker than any of ATI's current offerings so why, pray tell, would you be trying to mix it with an ATI at this point? I have one and, well, couldn't imagine any reason to waste RAM/CPU on multiple video drivers.

If you are talking about getting a $500 video card and sticking it on a board with integrated video, well, you've got some priority issues that you'll have to work out on your own.

I know this is probably something most people have looked down upon, but my friends and I used to dumpster dive at hardware distributors in my area just about every weekend. I got things like tower cases, empty raid chassis, piles of working hard drives, decent office supplies, etc. If not ordained, you'd be amazed at how 'clean' most computer company's dumpsters are. No food waste, diapers, or other grizzly things. Just cardboard boxes, all the anti-static bags you could ever want and the occasional soda can.

We all grew older, made more money and cut out the practice, but I was wondering if any of you currently do this? We would often run into police officers since they are curious about people in a business complex at 12am, but were often friendly and left us to our task. Is this still how it goes? I'd imagine with identity theft, coppers may be a little more agressive with people digging through the garbage.

Gotta love the OSS trolls. Amazing how on this dual boot box, Vista64 completes scene renders in Blender much quicker than it does in Ubuntu. The viewport is also quite a bit snappier in Windows. Sometimes mixing the two in various ways works better than claiming to be any sort of "purist".

Plus, Gimp + random assortment of graphical apps don't really hold a candle to Adobe's CS4 right now. With the additions of CUDA/PhysX accelerated plugins and OpenGl accelerated viewport, it's a whole different world editting large images while Gimp, well, gimps along doing the best it can. It's still a superior choice for a cost concious person, but not really in the same level of application nowadays.

Oh he's just trolling. I've got a KDE box sitting next to this one with 1GB in it and it would be hard pressed to have all that crap open without being swap city, even painful with a set of Raptor drives.

If, he's actually being honest, he really doesn't have any clue what it's actually like to sit at a workstation with 6-12gb of ram, superfetch enabled with an intel SSD holding the OS and swap. Lightyears of a difference.

Amen to that. Every crazy Vista issue I've heard about in the last year or so is due to hardware vendors dumping garbage products into the market and not writing proper drivers.

Honestly, I shop for my Windows hardware the same I shop for Linux hardware. Get a list of potential parts, google their part numbers with common key words like "supported", "drivers", etc. Hit the manufacturers forums and look for patterns, and if there's something noteworthy, like "doesnt work on computers with more than 3GB of RAM", I take it off my list.

There's just too many hardware/software vendors out there who will slap an unauthorized "Vista Certified" sticker on the box of random trash to make money. In the end, responsibility of being a smart consumer lies with the end user. I know it sucks, but people are mean.

Oh yes they will. I've seen more than one flip out over package management and break the company mold by putting their preferred distribution on a system to quickly solve a problem rather than spend the time carving up the currently installed distro to fit a need.

Think database servers and Redhat.

Well, that's what happens when you call consumer level support. They are for helping granny make that big E icon open to get to the interwebs. Now, if you have a problem with Windows 2008 Adv Server, it's a bit of a different story, but like getting REAL support for Linux, it's not free. Most companies don't have the time or money for some geeks to sit around spitballing on forums while their database server is offline. They usually pay someone to help when productivity is on the line.

I don't know why this sort of thing is such a topic. It's well-known people do not call support for their operating system for home systems. They usually bug a geek in the family, drag it down to microcenter/compusa/etc to have Windows reinstalled, or just buy another cheap computer. On a personal level, I've never known a single Win95/98/XP/Vista user who actually called Microsoft unless they needed a new activation code.

Anyway, the whole point of them pushing up the requirements for "Windows 7 Compatible" is to reduce the need for support to begin with. Look, I remember when Vista came around. I installed it on a once fancy AMD box with all the bells and whistles for 2005 and it ran like garbage. Now, I've got an i7 with all the current-day bells and whistles and have not had as much as one driver or compatibility issue while running 64 bit. Don't get me started on the lack of joy running Debian or Ubuntu desktops 64-bit. That'll head me down troll avenue as far as mods are concerned, but it's honestly more effort than joy regarding apps just working out of the box, or trying to run older 32-bit games without trouble. Usually if it isn't in the package tree, I just leave it alone at this point.