Community poll forum: How old is your operating system's current installation?

my computer is running windows vista basic less than a year. The thing is when starting there comes a pop up saying device detector not working and has to close up all the time.

Hi,
It's easy staying up to date with Linux, and no upgrade costs. Except that I am a member of the Mandriva Club which costs me about $12 per month. I see it not so much as a cost, but as a contribution. For many years I travelled free while these faithful Linux guys kept on pumping out more and more excellent work. Eventually I decided I should be contributing financially and not just politically.

This is contributed to a Community Forum, but no-one does "Community" better than the Open Source movement. If I strike a snag I can send an email to a list, and, get this, in many cases a developer of the particular software will be the one to respond. Don't get that from MS. Any way, the cheerful, and co-operative spirit of the OSS movement is a great encouragement, there are real people out there who are busting their *ss for you and me. And they genuinely like to help.

These days you do not have to be a geek to run a Linux OS on your computer, because Mandriva, Ubuntu, even Fedora Core are all very easy to install and use.

Stacks of useful software is free and dead easy to install, thanks to automated package managers in most modern distributions of Linux. These work from a GUI or from the Command Line Interface (CLI). The CLI is not as terrifying as some may think: imagine you want a finance package called Gnucash - oh, sorry it's already installed. Well let's say a Genealogical program called gramps, you can use the gui in Mandriva or you can open a Console and at the root command line, type in "urpmi gramps" (no quotes), that's it! The program will find where gramps is stored on the internet, and download it, and install it, without a reboot and within a couple of minutes you are ready to start looking up your family tree.

These days, everything works, unless you are on the expensive side of the bleeding edge of tech advancement. So if you are like 90% of computer users who trail a bit behind the "latest and greatest" then a modern Linux distro could set you free.

I have Windows XP Professional installed on all five of my computers -- old and brand new. Like the millions of others, I'm waiting to install Vista till we're at SP 1. It's not that I worry about Microsoft's initial reliability on new product releases -- I'm a retired micro-softie. I just haven't been hankering for a new interface and many of the new OS benefits aren't as compelling to an individual user as they might/should be to a corporate person or group. That said, people tend to forget that we all went through plenty of minor hells getting XP where we all wanted it to be in terms of reliability and stability. So, why change a great thing?

I'll be a happy XP user for another 1-2 years and then I'll probably move over to Vista after the first Service Pack is released -- about a year from now I expect.

Thanks and good luck everyone.

Brad

My laptop: Vista-7 months...The other 3 PC's all XP...all installations less than 2 years.

I have a Dell desktop running XP Professional and have not had problems with it. It is used daily for 10 hours or more, 7 days a week. It is superb. I recently bought a new computer and opted for XP Professional again. This is the 64bit version and is running alongside the old Dell. I will probably wait for Vista to iron out all the bugs before switching, if I switch.
Mike

i am finally going to replace this computer with a Dell XPS720 but it appears that they are only shipping with the 2-disk RAID supported right off the chip set instead of inserting a RAID array card that would support 4 disks instead of 2. the XPS 720 has the disk capacity, power and thermal to support 4 disks so i need to find out why they don't offer this configuration.]/b]

Two main reasons:

1.) Because it's expensive to do so. MOST consumers will look at the price of the extra two drives and won't see the real need to spend that extra money. Instead of buying four 80 GB drives for say, about $250, they'll go for two 160 GB drives for $175 - or better still ONE 320 GB drive for $100. It's all about the perception of the value.

Yes, a company that has mission critical stuff going on a PC will look at the expense and write it off as the cost of doing business, but try selling the merits of spending more money to the average home user and they'll look at you funny.

2.) RAID arrays, while cool and while they DO still serve a purpose, seem to be slowly falling out of favor in some circles. They're not perfect. They do have issues. There's the extra system overhead RAID configurations add to a system and in the end, they still might not save your data any better than a single drive with a good backup.

I have a vista one which is only about 2-3 months old but I do still have a windows 95 (upgraded to 98) laptop that is still running (but I never use it)and an XP laptop and desktop which are about 4 years old.

Brand new Mac with OSX.4

I have 3 computers at home, all now running Linux operating system. On one system, which is my personal server, I have Gentoo Linux installed for about 7 years now, without re-formating. But even if I didn't format it I have changed the motherboard and processor one time and even a hard disk. And yet all software is very up to date.
My other computers (laptop and a desktop) are now running Mandriva Linux (laptop is using 2007 Spring, on desktop I'm testing 2008 RC1). Laptop for about 2 years now and the desktop for about 3 years. I also didn't need any reformat on these two. Just the normal upgrade to the new version of Mandriva Linux when it comes out.

I have been running the same install on my Dual G5 2g system for over 5 years know. It has received all the updates and such. It is still running strong.

On my XP Home Laptop, the OS has had to be reloaded a couple of times. On my Pentium D Dell XP has run pretty well. It has had a number of meltdowns but never so bad that I had to reinstall the OS. Sure is a big improvement from Previous MS OS'es Well Win2k was pretty nice. I still like it better than XP.

My current install is less than a year old, but recovering from a fatal mobo failure will do that.
I've been running XP Pro from just before SP2 release, and rate the probability of moving to Vista somewhere between never to when hell freezes. If I have to change, Linux will likely be the go.

I just replaced my three year old Dell XP Professional computer with a MacBook Pro. OS X 10.4.10.

My computer has Linux Mint Cassandra installed about 5 months ago. I dual-boot with Windows XP (installed about two years ago) which I hardly ever use. My wife's machine uses Windows XP installed about 3 years ago. The Windows machine works fine; my Linux machine will be updated within a couple of months (new distribution coming) because it is so quick and easy!

I have a Hewlett Packard Kayak that I bought as a re-conditioned computer in 2002, It's operating service is Win98SE. It is still working great for an old O.S.

In January of 2007 I bought a Dell Dimension 8100 from a relative. It's O.S. is WinXP with service pack 2. It was bought new in late 2005, but hardly used when I got it. I had to rid the system of a couple of viruses that careless web surfing by the previous owners had caused it to pick up. Also restored quite a few gigabytes of storage by getting rid of junk that Dell puts on new computers.

Both computers are still working fine.

L.C.Soles