OT: For the computer gurus

[Doug]

Give an honorable mention to Comodo Internet Security which is also free and well regarded.

[Doug]

About a year or so when I was considering Linux, concensus of opinion then was it's not ready for prime time. It did get a lot of compliments tho even then.

[Dan Espen]

Someone gave you bad advice.

How hard is it to download a CD image, burn it to CD and then boot from the CD?

You can test drive Linux right from the CD, no need to install anything on your computer.

If you go no farther, at least you've seen how easy it is to operate. To install, just select the option to install.

[Wes Groleau]

There are a lot of people that have an irrational fear that they will fill up one of the partitions and create a boat anchor.

It's irrational because today's computers aren't heavy enough to make a decent boat anchor. :-)

[Wes Groleau]

I got a laptop recently for someone else. Windows 8 is tolerable, though I don't like it.

Unfortunately, my firend is visually impaired, and trying to enable any of those features pretty much trashed everything.

[HeyBub]

Yep. And what you end up with is a knock-off of a 40-year old operating system designed by a money-losing division of your local telephone company.

[trader4]

They typically don't. In all the PCs I've bought, the system directory was a sub directory of the C: drive. It's also typical for the drive to ship with two partitions, one of them being a restore image to be used if needed.

It hasn't become a semi-religion among users because for the most part, they have no control over it. It's the system developers and app developers that decide where data goes. And there is no standard, so some of it can wind up just about anywhere. I agree, it's a frustrating problem that you would think would have been resolved by industry standards a long time ago. But as it is today, with a lot of apps, you have no idea where all of the data, settings, etc reside.

[Frank]

Norton is free from my isp, Comcast. New computer with 2 months free Norton was not hard to overwrite with new Norton. Previous computer with McAfee and provider offering free McAfee, computer would not accept overwrite and I had to remove old McAfee before installing free McAfee. I would not assume that PITA old anti-virus is the same as today's versions. These things constantly change.

[George]

page

you will see how

Depends what aisle you are in. Friend just bought a low end hp notebook and it had at least 15 pieces of hp revenue enhancing software on it.

[George]

Symantec sells two versions of the "norton" product. The home version became overdone bloatware. The corporate version is essentially a much better written lighter weight product. The corporate version used to be just as bad as the home version but they cleaned it up because they were losing so much market share.

The MS product recently fell off the list of that group whose name I can't remember who certifies anti virus products and their detection rate went way down.

[George]

Because people want to just use stuff. The usual scenario is they run out of space on the drive where their profile stores its files and the second partition is empty.

So now many just ship with one large usable partition. Not a bad idea really because you should be backing up files to another physical location anyway.

[George]

Unfortunately many (including businesses) shop for price not value.

A good friend owns a commercial A/C - refrigeration business. One of his customers was verizon wireless. Someone started up a touted nationwide "mr maintenance" business and pitched it to them. Given all of the predicted savings it sure made sense to go with them.

So my friend was informed his services were no longer needed. "mr maintenance" contacted him and told him he could be "part of the team" for a significantly lower billing rate of course and my friend declined knowing he would only be helping "mr maintenance". He had a cooperative agreement with a company in another part of the state to cover each other when necessary. That company decided to be part of the "mr maintenance team". As expected the relationship lasted only long enough for "mr maintenance" to learn the ropes. My friend is good friends with the regional Verizon guy who said he wished he could call him because both the cost and response times had gone way up and they were just generally unhappy with "mr maintenance". As expected after two years verizon called my friend and asked if he would do their work again.

[trader4]

Did they buy it direct from HP or in a retail store, eg BestBuy? I wonder if some of the extra stuff depends on where you buy the same product, which may be what you're saying.

[Dan Espen]

Wrong.

What you end up with far exceeds what you get from a Windows install. First off, it's graphically prettier and more functional. Second, it comes LOADED with applications. Things you'd have to shell out big bucks for on Windows. A default install leaves you with dozens of applications.

Then you are just a click away from a massive library of additional programs you can install, all at no cost.

But hey, do what you want.

[Dan Espen]

Windows, industry standards?

You're kidding right?

Linux doesn't use drive letters. No reasonable OS would. Also, no reasonable OS would mix user data with the OS. All my user data is in my home directory.

My home directory can be on one drive or as many drives as I need.

[krw]

You can't argue with a "true believer". Linux is a religion much the same way as "Democrat" is.

[Dan Espen]

Oh, that was an argument? I didn't recognize it.

Okay, right, if something is 40 years old, of course it's bad, can't argue with that.

AT&T was losing money at the time? Somehow I doubt it, but well, if they were losing money, then of course Linux must be bad. It follows. Can't argue with iron clad logic like that.

Both Linux and Democrats are a religion? I need a new dictionary.

I've met my betters and need to heal my wounds.

I think I'll just put you in my killfile while the wounds heal.

Thanks for your valuable insight. Lesson learned.

[clare]

There is one "good" reason to split the drive in 2. It speeds up the hard drive access. They can advertize the system as being faster than if it was all one drive. Not much, but when numbers sell machines, that's all it takes. Better numbers, lower price.

[clare]

They were sure loosing mony on UNIX. So was SCO (The Santa Cruz Operation) and so did Microsoft on their Xenix version - as did "trusted". Why? because, for one thing, the market was too small to carry the load of the development and licencing fees.

[Dan Espen]

Whether the overall effort was a money loser would be hard to calculate. I was at Bell Labs at the time and we did all our mainframe development from UNIX. There really wasn't an alternative at the time. While other companies were still feeding punched cards into their mainframes AT&T could afford to put cheap terminals on every desk and reap the enhanced productivity.

Redhat has been turning a profit for at least the last 3 years.

Anyway making a profit isn't an indicator of the value of giving Linux a spin.