I have an Acer Travelmate with the SU-9400 cpu etc, it is marvellous. I get 5hrs of general net surfing etc before it gets down to 10% level. My broadband cable modem has a battery backup and should be good for at least the 5hrs the Acer lasts for.

Yes who would want to listen to loud binary files? I like mine a little softer with the treble down a bit.

No way, they should REDUCE the cost for the ad infested spyware version and leave the regular version alone! There, fixed it for you. Customer friendly marketing.

Scum and Trash or is it Trash and Scum Inc. These companies are turd polishers, the internet does not need them. The people that run these companies will take every last vestige of your private life and sell it if they think they can make a buck, please try to put them out of business as soon as possible.... perhaps we could get them an honest job, flipping' burgers maybe.

I feel for the ESL students, good luck and keep plugging away, the other trash bags should just be hung and the corpses left in the town square. These people are criminals! Hang 'em all!

Ubuntu fixes most windows problems

I can see your point, but my personal experience as the 'geek' for two grannies, my two 20 something kids, my 49 yr female cousin and myself is that they take to Ubuntu (8.04,9.04,9.10 and 10.04) like ducks to water if you give them the same attention that you give a newbie windows user. After a week or so they are hooked and love it. People can learn and some are eager to do so, just give them a little help, we all had it when we were 'windowed'. My 62 yr old granny is my best learner so far.

Just say "Microsoft has been replaced", they will nod knowingly... then show them how to use the good stuff.

scum or vermin to describe these "wanna be/never were"s.... There ya go, I tried to be nice to these parasites, but my personal integrity got in the way.

My oldest is a 9 year old 1300 Mhz celeron with 256 M ram ( 8 Meg for video ) MSI main board fitted out with a 160 Gig WD hard drive. It is running elive 1.9.62 at this stage, but was running lenny KDE 3.5.10 a few months ago, and Xubuntu 8.10 a few months before that, originally Win98 SE ( 64M ram ). It is my backup and "loaner" machine which is also useful for demonstrating GNU/Linux to possible Linux converts, (3 out of 4 winners so far) and I will be trying Xubuntu 10.04 on it this week. My new baby is an AMD Phenom 965 4 Gigs, 500 GB sata drive etc. I run a bunch of VMs to try out "new stuff" on the base Lenny 64 KDE 3.5.10 install etc..... I think I have achieved "tinkerer's Nirvana".

for when they announce to shareholders and industry analysts that they have lost about US$1.1 billion chasing after the Google train ... just so comforting. In ten years time will M$ be flushing perhaps 5 to 10 Billion shareholder dollars down the toilet annually,still chasing that Google search train ? What kind of idiots invest in a company such as this ? What kind of liars/cheats would recommend such a destructive force ?

What a great present! Now I have to get drunk.

I think it is bloody hilarious, but I've been reading /. all day long.

Yep, here in Brisbane, Australia I remember well that you could buy a retail copy of XP Pro 32 bit for $A695-00 -- bargain ! At the same time from this same bricks and mortar shop you could buy Windows 2000 Pro for $A699-00 -- more bargains! Of course it was possible to buy an OEM etc yada,yada. That's when I went looking to Linux for my next system which was Fedora Core 3, so that nails the timeline down a bit. The shop is still in business and growing because in general they move with the times and give excellent prices on hardware and they know how to take care of their customers. Not meant to be too much of a plug, just extended details - senior moments and all that!