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".