You know, call me naive, but I kind of like Google and I mostly trust them. They are obviously NOT using every last exploit of personal data or their technology to make a profit and ruin competition, and that's why people like them. People already trust them to vault loads of sensitive data. If this was Microsoft I might be more concerned, but maybe it's also Google's way of WAKING PEOPLE UP about leaving their networks open to anyone, including people you really can't trust, not just Google. (Microsoft weenies please post your irrelevant responses below where they can be ignored)

I have suffered through networking Win 95 and 98 usually without success. I have blue screened win2K by attaching USB devices. I have watched XP home imitate win98's crappy, crashy, buggy unreliablity.

I don't know a what level XP home and pro are different. I could hard waste my time with it. But they certainly are different.

MS has made 4 decent OS's: DOS, Win 3.1, NT and 2000. It took some serious convincing to make me believe 2000 was OK. But now MS is again releasing shit I would never consider learning beyond the minimum level.

I had heard Vista is buggy, slow and clunky and even more bloated. We went to play a movie on Vista the other day, which played on the laptop screen fine. We plug in a projector, and VIOLA! Vista shuts it down! says we have "inadequate media permissions" to use a projector, or some such shit. Turning off the panel made no difference. So we get out a POS dvd player to do what Vista was TOTALLY INCAPABLE of doing for the average user out of the box. What a load of crap.

Since Win2K MS has been pushing a unique marketing approach: don't worry about major bugs and really bad programming techniques and merging and rebranding a crap load of bought out third party software they did not even write. All they have to do is make a new major "release" with a new name and a new look and a slew of new, non-backwards-compatible features to go get certified for. The old bugs will just get replaced, buried or forgotten about because of all the new ones. So they never have to fix much of that badly designed and integrated code. Personally, Vista strikes me as a steaming load of manure even for MS. I would actually recommend people still install Win2K today. Maybe XP pro.

Windows. The disposable consumer OS.

Linux, BSD or other *nix's: what you learned 20 years ago on the *nix's of the day is almost as good today. which would you invest your time learning?