Yep, nearly ten years ago it was already possible to boot Windows XP from cold start within 30 seconds:

7200K 2MB cache IDE HDD + Athlon XP CPU + 512Mo DDR + some know-how :)

Please mod parent up, this is a very interesting video to watch.

Microsoft is evil, but don't ever use Apple as an example of a less evil company. Next to Apple, Microsoft's evil seems like they are small annoyances. Apple will place you in a torture rack and charge you for the privilege. Because the torture rack is really beautiful, has rounded corners, and an easy-to-use interface.

Why weren't you modded up as "+n Funny" ?

Clearly you missed all the legal cases against Microsoft, mounted by governments around the world. You managed not to see or hear all the evidence of illegal activity and the subsequent convictions.

If you want to describe a corporation as "evil" then at least look at their legal record and judge accordingly. Apple are a minnow compared to the whale of Microsoft in the world of corporate shenanigans and skullduggery. Both are insignificant compared to other corporations.

(Then there's the whole issue of how a corporation is neutral, as it makes absolutely no decisions and takes no actions. The people who work there, however, are another matter. And lastly, if you're getting upset about Apple or Microsoft, you're not ready to look at the world of big energy corporations. You'll need sedatives for that.)

Personally, I'd say that it does a little more. As long as your router drops incoming requests on the floor instead of forwarding them, it protects your LAN

NAT does not drop anything.

Nope, sorry. I've lived my whole life in Los Angeles. The closest that I've ever come to an icy road is one time when my ice maker overflowed.

Since these topics don't directly relate to the subject I've been asked to address, I've ended up with a section titled 'While I have you...' I'm going to have the mandatory attention of every employee and I thought it would be a great opportunity to give advice on [whatever]. As it's an opportunity that one seldom gets, I certainly want to utilize it fullly.

Resist the temptation. It's always a bad idea. That's why you seldom get the opportunity.

To clarify a bit, the "Conseil Constitutionnel" in France is supposed to check that new laws respect the principles of the French Constitution, which is supposed to respect the principles of the "Men and Citizens's Right Declaration" from 1789.
From now Internet in France is recongnized as a fundamental right, associated to the right to communicate freely.

Well my employer is a native of Cameroon and we are planning to open an office there at the end of the year because there is a lot to do in this country: build intranets and IT infrastructures, transmit knowledge to techs etc.

Of course we will support existing Windows installations but for our internal IT and for most of our solutions we'll use Linux and FOSS software, mainly because of the opportunity to start things in a different way.

We also think that because migrating things, re-training people etc will be less often needed, the adoption of these solutions will be easier than it is in more developped countries where Microsoft dominates machines and minds.

About perception, I see a similitude between FOSS and developping countries in the sense that both of them are trying to gain a place in a world/market which has been conquered by others.

PS: outside the technical field my English is a bit approximative, thanks for your comprehension.

Have you tried archlinux ? This distro is optimised for i686 and x64 architectures and thus is as reactive as a
fresh and clean XP install on the same hardware (R60 Thinkpad). The good thing about it is that unless XP it
stays reactive over time without requiring as much maintenance.
 
I also recently migrated my / and /home to ext4 and noticed improvements with the speed of disk operations:
booting, doing updatedb/makewhatis/etc, accessing package manager database etc.
 
I tried Mandriva, Fedora, Debian, Slackware and finally I'm happy with Arch especially because of it's snappy
feeling on a KDE environnement

Windows application and/or driver installation requires the application/package

This is precisely the point where Linux package system is far easier and secure to use than Windows one.

No Linux distro I have tried has EVER followed as simple an installation process. Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, DSL- Each had its own quirks, almost all of which required shell commands. (In fact, I believe all required it.)

When you tried those distros maybe you missed pirut, synaptics etc, the GUI frontends to rpm, apt, etc ?