Vista RC2: More Refined, But Still Not Perfect 217
jcatcw writes, "Scot Finnie continues his love — hate relationship with Windows Vista. He installed the latest beta, RC2, on three machines. First problem: drivers — too many of them that should be available just aren't. User Access Control remains annoying and Vista's Software Protection Platform puts antipiracy above user security. Software compatibility is still in need even at this late date. However, previous problems with the Media Center were absent." And turnitover writes to point us to PC Mag's RC2 review. Their bottom line is that they expect an RC2+ or even an RC3 before it goes final. Here is PC Mag's slide show.
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
Update: 10/09 19:33 GMT by kd : michigano writes: "This late in the game and Microsoft has pulled firewire support from their OS! No one knows if its permanent."
Perfect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Second thing - This RC is more like a beta
And well, when was anything perfect?
There's always more work to be done for everything, including vista
Re:Perfect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sheesh.
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Re:Perfect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm... Like support for firewire?
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Strange. In my book, Alpha means feature complete, beta means most things should be workable, and RC means that bugs are hard to find.
Looks like Windows Update will be the saving grace of Vista...
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Yes. That's the point of an RC. RC builds are candidates for release and as such are Feature Complete. If any show-stoppers are found then they fix them and release another RC build. If, after a reasonable amount of time, no more show-stoppers are found then the RC is retagged and reversioned as the final build and subsequently published.
Release Candidates are supposed to be fit for release, if they aren't then changes are made to make them fit for release. Hence the term "feature complete" (depending on
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Feels Like Street Fighter! (Score:5, Funny)
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Who cares if you call it an RC or a Beta? If you are developing hardware or software for the Vista platform you are good to go and that is all that matters.
Drivers... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Some PC manufacturers and vendors are multi-interest like sony. Linux sure as hell won't turn around and say, yes give us your DRM! MS can use that kind of leverage to work on some exclusivity to make sure a few vendors won't turn around and be tempted to put linux on their machine and in return they give you all the DRM you want.
There isn't one end user out the
Re:Microsoft and DRM (Score:4, Informative)
Stop spreading this goddamn lie that I see coming out of the mouth of every fool who hasn't even bothered to see if it's true in Vista! You don't even have the capability to enable copy protection on MP3 files encoded in Windows Media Player 11! It doesn't even default to using copy protection when you encode to WMA or WMA Pro!
Some people might not want their own personally created and original content redistributed to other machines.
By the way, there's plenty of DRM support making it's way into the Linux world, you obviously don't know where to look if you haven't seen it making it's way.
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I was speaking on the general state of windows computing. Currently under XP this can happen if you're not careful what you check. I had someone ask me about this just yesterday. MS
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I'll check that out next time I boot my XP to play The Sims 2 (Currentl
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I didn't say it was the default, I said its possible if you don't pay
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I'll say it again, you have to tell Windows Media Player that you want to encode copy protected WMA files, by default it does not and apparently WMP10 in XP SP2 doesn't even give you the option of encoding to MP3, which WMP11 in Vista does. I was able to successfully do my first rip with WMP10, it defaulted to 128kbps WMA non-protected, and copy the file over to multiple computers here at home and have it play back without issue. I call bullshit on your story about your friend and postulate that he pulled a
RC2 is the first "buggy" version for me (Score:5, Interesting)
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On the plus side, the XP installation on the same box could access the Vista files.
I havent had the time to reinstall and test further, but...
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More refined guys, in SP1 :) (Score:5, Interesting)
It's obvious there's lots of patchwork in it. I browse the control panel and display properties and get the same feeling I have when looking at work I did in the last minute with a glue and duct tape.
IE7 still crashes like mad on Google Maps for some reason, and what's with the single tab display properties? What's the point of a tab bar, when you have always one single tab in it? We'll never know.
My Wacom tablet works terribly with Vista newfound tabletPC intelligence, it keep sassuming clicks I never have done, I had to go and basically disable all smart features and it still is funky (I can barely use a combo box with my Wacom in Vista).
It's apparent they'll be shipping it to the factory in few days either way, so I'm just hoping once they're done, they start working on a SP1 to be done for the January release that will fix all this mess.
Re:More refined guys, in SP1 :) (Score:5, Funny)
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Perhaps a subtle way of saying to your users: "Pssst. You can open up tabs." If they're hidden by default (as, for example, in Firefox), a user could go for months or even longer without even knowing they were there.
The cynic in me (see sig) wonders if it's actually because the rendering gets b0rked when you reduce the window height to display the tabs...
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The answer is that the code to modify display properties is specially crafted and actually requires that it be displayed in a tab. This is true for a lot of applets in Windows. There are explanations for it from the Vista shell team at their blog site's forums [shellrevealed.com].
There's a lot of creative reasons why Windows still looks like Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and does so
Love? Hate? (Score:2, Insightful)
What matters if it delivers value. What matters if it meets the requirements. What matters if it is usable. What matters is if it delivers on the promise. What matters is support. And so on and so forth...
Re:Love? Hate? Ignorance? (Score:2, Interesting)
I overlooked it... (Score:2)
One good thing about vista, crackers and wormware writers will start focusing on that and, hopefully, leave my PC alone :o)
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[ Reply to This ]
Crackers concentrate on the weakest link, not on the toughest. Old (and unpatched) Windows releases are what they target, Vista will be targeted only if it's significantly easy to exploit (which, if we believe the features, won't be the case).
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Crackers concentrate on the weakest link, not on the toughest. Old (and unpatched) Windows releases are what they target, Vista will be targeted only if it's significantly easy to exploit (which, if we believe the features, won't be the case).
They also attack where the greatest number of targets will be. If there's a significant number of vista machines on the net they'll be toiling away trying to break in, I have no doubt they will succede.
Who knew? (Score:2)
Re:Yup (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't that Microsoft has implemented UAC, it is the horrible way that they did it. You don't enter a password to install new software, you must click on a button that is on a different part of the screen every time it pops up, and it can pop up a lot if you are doing administrative tasks. So most people will simply choose to disable UAC, reboot, and never re-enable it again. That defeats the entire purpose of the feature.
Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking. If the time runs out, ask for the password again. This allows people to perform Administrative tasks without constantly having to click on annoying dialog boxes for every step they perform.
For good examples of how to do this properly see Mac OS X or most versions of Linux running a GUI.
Microsoft can't even copy good ideas correctly.
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Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking.
The way OS X and Linux do this with sudo is a gaping security hole.
Added to that, I strongly suspect the functionality you are asking for is fundamentally incompatible with Windows's security model.
What sort of "administrative tasks" are you doing that are resulting in so many UAC prompts so quickly ?
Seems somehow familiar... (Score:3, Funny)
So
Who was expecting "perfect"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's ignore people's feelings about Microsoft for a second. A hypothetical software developer has made a lot of changes to their operating system, rewriting a lot of internals, and making huge changes to their UI. Who here is expecting that this hypothetical software release will be "perfect" when it goes gold?
At best, even assuming Microsoft is a great software developer, there will be bugs and problems when it goes out the door. I don't believe that should be our question. My questions are, Is it usable? Will it increase my productivity over Windows XP? Does the new UI offer something beyond being "new"? Are there new features that I'll actually want to use?
Or to bang all of those questions into one super question, Are there any reasons why I'll want to upgrade? If I could add a second, it'd be, Are there any reasons why I won't want to upgrade?
But if you tell me that there aren't drivers for everything yet, well of course there aren't because it's not released yet, but there will be drivers for most things soon. If you tell me there's some little bug on your particular machine, that doesn't bother me. Release broadens the diversity of hardware that software is running on, and so even if everything was perfect in the beta stage, there will be some bugs.
Re:Who was expecting "perfect"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are there any reasons why I'll want to upgrade?
Yes.
If I could add a second, it'd be, Are there any reasons why I won't want to upgrade?
Yes.
Of course there are always going to be "features" you'll want to upgrade for and there will be "features" (like DRM) that you will want to avoid. The question is how many people will hold out until the DRM "features" will force them to "upgrade" to the new OS because nothing else will work anymore.
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Vista will not be 100% perfect on every machine. It will have less driver support and optimization than XP at first. This is a known fact, since so much of the internal of the OS has been rewritten.
XP had an advantage with drivers, because the win98/win2k driver generation worked flawlessly on XP for the most part. Vista is is only 'partially' true, because if the drivers are poorly written or try to do unsecure things, Vista won't let them do it.
There is a
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Well, actually it isn't the 'saftest' thing to do, but does demonstrate the OSes ability to recover from fairly major hardware problems. The design is to recover from a driver/hardware malfunction and not leave the user stranded with no display if for some reason the Video driver or card goes wrong.
XP had some ability to recover from video driver failures,
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Whats the point in look at RC's (Score:3, Insightful)
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Mechanics and engineering are extremely well understood disciplines that have been practiced for thousands of years.
Software "engineering" isn't, and hasn't.
In those respects at least, no, putting up a building or making a car is *not* as major as Windows, or a Linux distro, or indeed any complex application.
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Is this with or without hacked DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
Inquiring minds with sharpies want to know
Microsoft should put UAC password prompts back in. (Score:4, Interesting)
That was a bad move on both parties' account, IMO. There's a
IE7 Toolbar Mayhem [slashdot.org]
You basically get a choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically you get to choose how you want it. Now you are right in that normal users won't use the password option but you do have to be realistic here
They did on LH Server (Score:2)
People talk crap about UAC, but I actually like to know when a given piece of software wants admin priviledges - something I never had on windows
Who do they expect to buy this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who do they expect to buy this? (Score:4, Funny)
They'll also sell a lot of Vista licenses to offices whose IT shops want to maintain only a single platform. Once they start having to buy new PCs with Vista, they'll want to upgrade the entire shop. The larger the ratio of users to IT, the more they're going to standardize their systems. It's a convenience for them, like replacing the lightbulbs all at once rather than waiting for them to burn out.
Individual users will continue to use their XP installations for perhaps 3-5 years. Over time bits of hardware fail and it's easier for many to replace the entire thing, especially when that elderly PC starts to feel pokey in comparison to the new computers; the new software will find ways to use the extra CPU power. And with a Windows installation, it may not be an illusion of contrast: between registry/DLL bloat in legal software, and the many users who will be infected with malware, it may actually be slower. Cleaning the OS and replacing components gradually becomes less efficient than just buying a shiny new one.
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This isn't true, especially not for such a major shift that Vista's bringing. It requires training for the
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And admins who want to administer printers using the Printer management tool that came with 2003R2 without logging into a 2003 server.
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Why do I feel I'll play them in CeDeGa?
One thing's for sure, I'm not upgrading the XP I have here for gaming purposes to Vista.
It's Jabba the Hutt of operating systems.
I mean, how many GiBs does a default install consume? 12? 20? And that just for a spiffy interface, Notepad, Paint and Solitaire?
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I've seen it spelled like that.
If I'm wrong, I thank you for the information.
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I might be wrong, but I seem to remember that it was somewhat less than 4.
Compare that with the 6.5GB+ of UT 2004.
MOLP (Score:2)
And if that means more servers ( for their licensing schemes ) or new hardware, well, it sux to be you.
So to answer the question, lots of people will in time.
Hate to love, love to hate (Score:3, Insightful)
Random thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
Do translucent windows add anything to the use experience?
User: "Oh look, at the top of my window through a
But I will say it's coming bugs and all so you all might as well get used to it. Just think of how much money you'll make installing and fixing Vista? Just think of how little I'll be paying for Vista thanks to having MSDN via work...Big kisses to MS now!
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I'll take it XP wasn't installed on it, then... it takes more reboots just to install it.
Damned RAID (Score:2, Insightful)
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I've no idea why the RAID controller folks didn't work harder to get their drivers into the box.
I went to the vista install fair in mtn view (Score:4, Insightful)
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?fo
in short, these things didn't work for me:
- avira antivir (threat to MS on their own 'defender' ?)
- monaco optix xr pro (screen calibrator 'puck'; aka 'colorimeter'. pro photog guys NEED this)
- oem nero6 (I need that for lightscribe work. MS doesn't do LS, I don't think, and sadly neither does unix)
- cisco vpn (I use that to login to work remotely. this is a must-have for me.)
it also didn't like my epson scanner (1640su). a very standard and high quality flatbed scanner - not on the supported list.
it took 4 hours to do an upgrade (at the MS building, on sunday, yesterday) on an amd64 x2 3800 dualcore system. sigh.
its good that I cloned my disk before I brought my box over to them. that disk will get scrubbed and put back on the shelf and I'm back to using XP for pshop/cs2 work - where ALL my hardware and sw continues to work.
zero reason to upgrade to vista. zero. in fact, it brings me backwards and forces me to re-buy perfectly good hardware. that color puck was $300. I will NOT be re-buying THAT again - it works fine in xp and does what its supposed to.
vista is very close to shipping. and there are MAJOR failings. this does not bode well.
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- avira antivir (threat to MS on their own 'defender' ?)
- monaco optix xr pro (screen calibrator 'puck'; aka 'colorimeter'. pro photog guys NEED this)
- oem nero6 (I need that for lightscribe work. MS doesn't do LS, I don't think, and sadly neither does unix)
- cisco vpn (I use that to login to work remotely. this is a must-have for me.)
This kind of software almost NEVER works with a new OS.
vista is very close to shipping. and there are MAJOR failings. this does not bode well.
Come on. We've had 12 years of m
Seriously, they must be joking (Score:5, Interesting)
Please, somebody pinch me. IE is clogging up 1 GB of memory in the final build of Vista before launch?! Well, it explains the insane sys reqs though.
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Vista will not be ending up on any of my renderfarm machines for that very reason.
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1.) Available Physical RAM - the more RAM you have installed, the more it will use by default because it enables certain in-memory caching features and other performance related boosting features. I have a machine with 512MB of RAM and RC2 installed. On startup, with nothing else open, it uses about 320MB of RAM.
2.) Current Memory Pressure - Windows will relinquish memory that it is uses if it detects that applications need it. Sometimes this is throug
Black box testing won't find most bugs (Score:4, Interesting)
1. There are strong mathematical reasons why it is near-to-impossible to find more than about 20% of the bugs in a system (of any significant size) using black box testing.
I don't recall the proof. As I recall the most important factor is algorithmic complexity - every additional two-way branch doubles the number of possible paths through the control flow. For perspective, a program with just ten branches requires 1024 different tests, for EACH grouping of input data.
Data issues provide more complexity. Heuristics may help discover as many of the pathological cases as possible. For example, every input data element (variable) must be checked at the 'fenceposts' (ends of the range), inside the range, and outside the range. Inside the range, there may be regions or single values that can affect the usage of other variables (e.g., angles might be defined in [0,2Pi] but tan (pi/2) is pathological), so those are another kind of fenceposts that must be discovered and tested for.
(There are many resources online. Wikipedia/Software Quality [wikipedia.org] is a reasonable place to start.
2. Given a 'good quality' development system using techniques such as structured programming, code walkthroughs, manual and automated code analysis, and some other things, about 80% of the bugs will be in the original design document. (Another justification for Extreme Programming? [extremeprogramming.org])
Interestingly, something like 50% of these may be arguments regarding usage. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" is often a valid argument - a 'screwed up menu' for one user may be just perfect for another. Of course, providing options to the user as X11 does, is often itself considered a 'misfeature' for the general public, if not an outright bug.
3. Given the same system, only about 20% of the total resources (time, budget) will be spent in the development phase. As I recall, about 20% -> planning and design phases, 20% to development, 40% during SQA, and the last 20% after release.
4. Again with the same system, the designed, QA'd, tested, and released code will have approximately 1 bug every 200 lines of code (while there are arguments about using Source Lines of Code [wikipedia.org] as a programmer performance metric, it can be more easily justified for this purpose, as we can assume that most languages will have about the same level of ambiguity regarding what is a line of code.) This ratio has been empirically shown to run true across all types of programming, from assembler to 4G database code. I recall reading a couple of years ago that Microsoft admitted a rate of one bug per 80 lines of code, but I don't have a citation, so I can't say for sure.
All modern OS have about the same number of lines (according to the above), using the same metrics - about 30 million. This is apparently true for XP and for various recent distributions of Linux - Redhat, Debian, and others, including the applications that came with the distributions. Therefore, every OS ships to the customer containing something on the order of 150,000 bugs. I once listened to a presentation by the then-head of IBM's OS software support group - I think for OS/360, but it might have been a later product. They released a new version every three months, and customers found another 2000 bugs every time.
A probable advantage of Unix-like systems is the relative independence of different applications and components. Each application presumes less about its environment, and so can be less susceptible to problems caused by interactions within the environment. This helps to break the algori
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One thing that F/OSS advocates (rightly) point out (everytime there is a windows vs linux security bug count study) is that not all bugs are equal. While defects/KLOC is interesting in a variety of ways, it is not nececssarily a good indicator of how well the software meets the needs of the user(s), and ultimately, how well the software meets the needs of the user(s) is what matters (its what matters to users, and its what matters
As I Recall... (Score:2)
I kept using Windows98 until maybe 5 or 6 months down the road when XP became usable for the masses.. by this time all the major software c
Questions... (Score:3, Interesting)
* Is disk-defragmentation history?
* Does Vista provide a software manager connected to massive software-libraries on the internet, so we can install and update applications en masse?
* Does Vista have multiple desktops?
* Can we choose between different desktop environments?
Firewire is NOT gone (Score:4, Informative)
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>Firewire is NOT gone
Shame, Firewire is fantastic, I was hoping that all the fab external firewire drives would become as cheap as cheaps for the rest of us who do not use Windows.
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Maybe they don't include drivers on purpose... (Score:2)
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The betas are programmed to expire in about 9 months (June 2007, IIRC). Withholding drivers is dumb because it withholds part of the experience of the OS.
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Another day, another RC (Score:2, Insightful)
The funny thing is I have yet to see a Linux distribution release come out bug-free either. In fact, in the 12 years I've been playing with Linux, I've seen at least a handful of releases that, a month later, had hundreds of megs of "bug fixes". And I remember at least one distribution that, upon its final release, destroyed certain CD recorders. I won't even bring up the fact that I have PCs that Ubuntu wo
Antipiract above security? Give me a break. (Score:2)
"If validation code, written by Microsoft, decides that your installation of Windows Vista has been pirated, it turns off the Aero interface and a minor performance technology called ReadyBoost. I'm okay with that. But I am absolutely not okay with the third punitive measure: The disabling of Windows Defender, Microsoft's new onboard anti-spyware utility. Other punitive measures according to published reports include the disabling of Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player."
You know this is
What? (Score:2)
My firewire external drives won't like that very much.
How much more complicated can firewire be, than USB 2.0? I mean, the code already exists and works for XP, they're supporting USB removable drives, how many monkeys does it take to port a few extra routines?
Anti 'piracy' (Score:2)
hardcore 'Pirates' will get around it
large corporates dont care
average home users will have to upgrade anyway and most of the pcs they buy will already have the microosft tax.
The only losers are small businesses caught in the middle. And these days they have more options open to them, and can 'just say no' if they want.
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Re:So which is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all betas are RCs.
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The only improvement I've seen in RC2 over the last release is that Vista is no longer randomly blue-screening for me on startup. However, UAC is still INCREDIBLY annoying (you'll see...), it still takes too long to boot compared to the 12 seconds that OS X takes on the same hardware, and none of the sloppy interface issues have been fixed. It's a
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Odd.
1: Doom3, at least, is fully capable of telling the windows key to frack off.
2: Look up "windows shortcut keys" in the Windows help files. It's a fairly useful key. (And if you don't like it, you can always just remove it and cap the button. might take you all of ten minutes.)
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Windows Shortcut Keys [microsoft.com]
I knew a bunch of these, but there are a ton of good ones out there. Don't know how much I'll use them, but I'll take it into consideration. My favorite, by far:
Windows Logo+S: Toggles CAPS LOCK on and off
Thanks, I don't have a key that already does that.... wait a second! The real problem is, my laptop cut the Windows key out and put the function key there instead.
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>Is it a beta release, or is it a release candidate?
With recent Microsoft products, evidence suggests it should be considered a Beta up to the release of SP2.
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So do it already (Score:2)
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Linux: More Refined, But Still Not Perfect
W2K does everything I ask it to with no fuss, my next machine may have Linux, but then it may have W2K again.
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It sounds like what you meant to say was, "My system isn't broken, so I'm not messing with it." That's pretty reasonable.
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Want a free kubuntu disk ? Just ask..
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