and. might I add, once they have the start menu and boot to a desktop, the ONLY complaint I have heard about windows 8 is the damned ugly window borders. I see a lot of money for stardock when they finally get a version of WindowBlinds for windows 8

I don't know of anyone who has left windows over windows 8.... EVERY SINGLE person I know who has purchases a machine since October has either installed windows 7 on it, or installed something like classic shell, set it to give them a start menu and boot to the desktop... No exodus however.

So that means that every employee has an over-priced Herman Miller Chair, and you better be in the office sitting in it, because like all start-ups, Yahoo requires you to be physically sitting in the office at all times....... yeah, right!

This is the most obvious April Fool's joke of them all

If you are looking for a touch screen, then the 12" screen requirement is going to make it hard to find. There just aren't that many systems out there that are touch (The Iconia W500, which I own and love, is one but you ruled it out because of a 10" screen) that are not windows 8 systems, and while win 7 MIGHT install on one of those, it also might not.

You could always do a windows 8 tablet with a windows 7 vm running at boot.

If a stylus is fine, then you have a whole sew of possibilities. I also own a gateway cx2750 running win 7 and I used it for meetings until very recently simply because the handwriting recognition in win7, once trained is simply amazing. It has the screen size and res you are looking for, but its not light. Of course I have the extended battery in mine, which makes hodling the damned thing a lot easier, even if it is heavier.

Windows RT and the Risc based surface were mistakes. If people wanted locked in, crippled computing devices, the iPad is better established. The ability to have a full computer would have been a great differentiator. Windows 8 on a full computer is great. I have an acer iconia w500 running full windows 8. Its great. It is what Surface should have been if MS could have pulled their collective heads out of their asrses.

At what point do we delineate the difference between historian and sociologist. Historians (not just history teachers who teach by rote) discuss the facts and trends of the society in the past, the sociologist the facts and trends of the present society, but from the time something happens, is digested and dissected and correlated, it is the past.

I am not even sure why modern browsers support frames anymore. I don't think I've seen a framed site since geocities shut down. There is absolutely no need for frames.

i disagree that itunes is valid for managing media. I have triedon numerous occassions to let it catalog my media library and it just chokes horribly. admittedly, not everyone has 65,000+ music files, but iTunes can't handle very large collections without barfing horribly.

You purchased rights for the standard def version of the movie, not the high def. Saying this is not piracy because you purchased the standard DVD is like saying that you have the rights to a Lincoln town car because you purchased a Ford Taurus. Same company, both are cars, one is much better than the other. You bought one, not the other.

william dot byrd (gmail) please?

Burn them!!!!

Its a shame that MS never figured out how to actually implement this. How many times do I have to restart my computer to finish applying update?

I have to second you on the Gateway tablets. I have the CX-2750. Same form factor. The now 2 year old batteries still give me about 3.5 hours on balanced power settings. Came with Vista, and was the only computer I have ever seen where Vista was not a POS, it was almost as if that machine was a reference system. Vista actually had slightly better pen tracking that windows 7.

For those who say that handwriting recognition is a trick and never works. I write on mine all the time, in cursive and it has no trouble with the recognition. I don't even remember the last time I had to correct it. Of course I have extremely good handwriting, and I did spend 20 minutes training it when I installed windows 7 on it. All in all, except for the weight, its the best computer i have ever owned.

I played this special last year for my (then) 5 year old son who is a Star Wars freak (probably knows almost as much as the old man, and when I told him that one day, he simply replied "Now *I* am the master" ). About 20 minutes into the show, he came to me and asked me to turn it off. Asked me if I could put something else, anything else on tv. It was that bad.