missing my Saturn

That is the stupidest reason for buying a car I've ever heard. Ray G. Using his crummy, expensive, Windows ME PC to send e-mail.

you don't get out much, do you? People buy houses because they have a certain character. People buy cars for all kinds of reasons. Character is the least of "stupid" reasons. (Think: "Because it matches the color of my shoes")

"Character" can embrace a variety of aspects of a car, from how you're treated at the dealership to handling to interior comfort to reliability and so on.

-rj

98SL2

snipped-for-privacy@pond.com (Ray Greenberg) wrote in news:40ca1f6c.751374 @news.mammothnews.net:

What?!?! Most people buy cars that they like. "It's cute", "It's cool" are phrases you'll hear. To me, cars with personality are what I like. I guess you're one of these Consumer Reports nerds with their statistical printouts and such. Give me a Saturn over a dull Corolla, Sentra, Civic anyday.

That must really hurt coming from someone who owns Windows ME........

snipped-for-privacy@aol.comNHRA (BANDIT2941) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mb-m02.aol.com:

ME's about as bad as Windows 98. XP is a lot better and crashes a lot less. Plus it actually has neat features.

If you guys want a good windows operating system the best has to be windows 2000 pro. Its very stable and looks like the older o/s's and not like a fisherprice toy. XP has more bloat than I could put up with.

I have a truck to haul stuff and only carry maybe 4 people at most in the Venture and not much cargo. But the Venture's nice for car camping after taking out the seats and leaving them home. My wife and I sleep on the air mattress in the back. We might get that new Saturn minivan after we sell (if we sell it).

ME's about as bad??? Puhleeze!!! ME is much worse than 98SE.......

ME was a dumbed down version of 98 - nothing but problems resulted. Flame wars aside, I have to run XP (classic mode - not the playskool mode) because some applications for my job ONLY run on win32s, ie ESRI's ArcGIS; beyond that I'm running a couple of variants of linux on other machines. My reasons for choosing linux when possible range from the philophical to the technical.

-rj

98SL2

I respect your wanting to go with some other OS than one from Micro$oft. What's the best flavor of linux for me, a somewhat technically capable person but new to Linux? Lycoris looks cool. My 2nd PC is a Compaq Deskpro small form PC, Pentium 2, 450mhz. It has Win98 on it now. My AMD Athlon system has XP.

[Kind of long, mostly antecdotal]

I've never used Lycoris personally, but it appears to be pretty easy to get started with.

One of the things that you'll find about linux, in general, is that it doesn't take mammoth hardware to run it. For many distros, a PII/450 is plenty. Sure, it won't run as fast as a faster machine (duh?), but it works and works well. In fact, I'm running a stripped down version of linux in my basement - on a 33MHz 486/DX2 w/ 24MB of RAM, booted from a floppy.

Distrowatch.com

is a good place to start. They have good summaries of the distros available, and you can see what you think you're comfortable with. Linux documentation is available all over the place, but I often turn first to linuxdoc.org when I'm trying to figure something out. I personally use Redhat, but partly because it is an easy, popular, and most important to me, *stable* server platform. I've had it running for over a year without a reboot. Had it not been for unannounced power outages and a couple of harddisk failures, I'm sure it would have kept going long beyond that. I've also used Mandrake and was fairly happy with it, until I did too many dumb things in a row (by choice, not accidentally) and finally broke it real good.

Knoppix seems like a good way to just play without actually changing anything on your harddrive - just boot from the CD and away you go.

One of the things I really like about linux it being free: Free as in speech, and free as in beer. You don't have to fret about sinking 300$ into something you might hate. If there is something about the distro you don't like, you have a plethora of options, ie: don't like KSpread (the KDE spreadsheet program)? go fetch Gnumeric or OpenOffice. If you really get adept, and you find something that really just bugs you, there is probably an option to change that setting. If not, you have the freedom to change the code to make it work like you want it to. I've done this on several occasions. Recently I was trying to generate

700 single-page PDFs for a report - each one the same except about a different area of Ohio. Can you imagine trying to do this with Word? I downloaded a perl tool called 'PDF::Reuse' and tied it into my database. There was a problem and the author of PDF::Reuse helped me get around it. Another problem I had I was able to fix myself by editing the PDF::Reuse source code.

I've always felt like Windows is sort of like those cars at Disney World which follow the track. You can kind of steer them, but they're going to go where the track goes. Linux is more like off-roading - you can go wherever the hell you want. You might get lost, but at least you have the freedom to get lost.

-rj

98SL2

XP only has bloat if you let it, my XP Pro install looks, feels and acts the exact same way as my old 98 install, runs almost as fast (98 had squat for overhead) and it hasnt crashed in over a year. Win2K was a pretty good OS when it came out, and light years ahead of that piece of crap NT, but it doesnt hold a candle to XP in terms of stability, performance, and hardware support.

Wurm

LOL. My ex-gf's mother brought her Win98 CD over and installed win98 on my ex gf's PC. Irony is that my ex gf's mother was worth 5 million dollars (inherited from her grandparents)! If the rich won't pay for their OS, who will?

I have a legit XP on my Athlon XP system (came with the system). I put it on my second system, a Compaq Deskpro sff 450 mhz P2, but it only stays on the HD for 30 days before deactivating itself and telling you to call a Microsoft rep. to activate it. Will Windows allow you to have XP on 2 systems? I think probably not, so I didn't even bother to call. I just installed a legit Win98SE on it (have it on CD). But I'd much rather have XP on the Compaq also. I think I'll install a flavor of Linux on the Compaq and learn about linux.

There is to much bloat in xp. For example There is no mplayer version=20

6.4 on xp. You can make the new versions look like the old versions but=20 it still takes longer to load mplayer than before. You can make xp look=20 like the old versions of windows but it still slow on bring up programs=20 etc because their is so much more packed into the encoding. Besides=20 every new release by microsoft is always full of holes. Win2k is nearly=20 patched up by now xp has 2 more years before I would trust it. =20 Nt was never intended for the average home users but Win2k supports=20 everything i've thrown at it so far. And besides that you have more=20 freedom with installing it on the pc's in your home. Who the hell is=20 going to buy a copy of xp for every pc they own as Bill Gates wants=20 everyone to do? He's made of money, we're not. Why should I have to call=20 someone to get permission to install software? If I have hardware=20 troubles I dont need to be calling microsoft ontop of replacing pc parts=20 in troubleshooting a problem. I'm already stressed enough as it is then.

I say avoid XP and tell Gates to shove it.=20

My 2=A2

Now back to Saturns! or the like...

hehehe, another option is that if you happen to use any Windows on your PC at work (if you work in an office environment of course!) you are actually legally entitled to make a copy for personal use at home free of charge. The only technical stipulation is that only one of the two PCs is allowed to be running at one time (although I dont believe they track this).

Two Windows PC's, both up at the same time? Only if they're both showing the Blue Screen of Death, and most will agree that's not running :-)

Tim.

ya know, that would have been funny 5 years ago......... now its just kind of ignorant