OT. Dell

You must love loading in/configuring your software if you actually want a replacement machine when it breaks. ;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)
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I don't agree. 95% of problems with software are because of the inability of the user. If those 95% of uses who are unable to use software properly had Linux installed, it would go wong for them as often as Windows does.

tim

Reply to
tim.....

I have no intention of fighting with a character in a Peanuts cartoon... especially one who is Charlie Browns best friend.

Reply to
The Medway Handyman

Because you can get a moderately spiffing new laptop for £399 in Tesco. The OLPC computer is designed for its target market; many of its features such as its dual-mode screen are irrelevant or even undesirable for mass-market users. It also has very limited operating system support, needing an OS that can run from flash memory, which rules out anything by MS probably later than circa DOS 3.

The manufacturing and distribution model is also geared to national orders of c. a million units.

Owain

Reply to
Owain

I have had three Dells and have built three to my own spec.

If you want a run of the mill home PC it is not worth building your own. You will not be able to build the same spec for 250 quid as they can sell you one for. However, if you are looking at overclocking - a couple of huge drives - RAID - serious sound card and graphics then build your own.

Reply to
jack

Dunno. Never tried KDE. But GNOME is *huge*.

Reply to
Huge

That's exactly how I feel.

About Windows.

You're all confusing familiarity with ease of use.

Reply to
Huge

Ditto. I would really like to see open source take over from Microsoft. Ubuntu installed fine on my computer. The big problem was getting the internal modem to work with it. In short it didn't and there didn't appear to be any drivers to make it work. Wasted hours trying to sort it out but gave up in the end.

Back to XP. I'm still avoiding hardware with Vista though.

Reply to
David in Normandy

"verging on potential disappointment!"

that could be the understatement of the year so far.

I think I will do a straw pole in the pub tonight just to see if Joe public has the faintest idea about Ubuntu/Linux

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Reply to
Mark

Well I'll be honest and tell you that I do know what Linux is but have never ever seen it, and that I'd never heard of Ubuntu until this afternoon...

What happens if you need to share files (or even view them?) with any of the other 99% of the world who uses MS Office, for example? Presumably any of these OS are a non-starter, surely?

David

Reply to
Lobster

Probably a Winmodem (which is just a phone line interface, and not really a modem, as the modem is implemented in the Windows driver.)

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Ha cue lots of people to tell you its fine you can do all that no problem.

Which is true,

. . . .

sort of.

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Reply to
Mark

In article , David in Normandy scribeth thus

But how much longer for there is new hardware that doesn't have anything other than Vista drivers..

Some sort of collusion maybe?..

Reply to
tony sayer

There's an opensource product called OpenOffice which can read/write Microsoft office documents, and there are commercial versions of it such as StarOffice (which it originally came from) from Sun. This runs on all the popular unixs, Linux, and Windows. I put StarOffice on my Mum's Windows PC a couple of years ago, and although she's only a novice PC user, I don't think she has any idea she's not running Microsoft Office (except things like macro viruses don't work on her system when they do on all her colleagues':-).

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Those '99%' should share files using a universal file format like plain text. Same as newsgroups, etc. But this doesn't suit the likes of BG who wishes to tie up the world into his expensive systems.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

What a dreadful thought. Hardware that only runs with Vista! I'm hoping that before too long all hardware vendors supply drivers for all operating systems. But that may be pie in the sky.

In my humble opinion there are two main reasons why the likes of Ubuntu haven't yet made much impact on Microsoft's monopoly:

  1. Lack of plug and play for Ubuntu. People expect to install an operating system and for it to work, full stop. No hunting around the Internet for drivers to get all the hardware components working, or spending hours on forums trying to work out how to get the computer running properly.
  2. Lack of simple to understand graphical interfaces for everything. People expect to open windows and click things or select items from drop down menu's, not to open up configuration files using some obscure text editor and edit scripts written in "Martian".

Until both points are fully addressed, I fear Linux will remain largely for the computer geeks.

Reply to
David in Normandy

Not as bad as you might expect... part of the difficulty with some of the free download versions of the various Linux's is that some of the media playing extras need to be downloaded and installed separately due to licensing issues.

If what you do is mainly productivity stuff (handle documents, play media, email, web etc) then there is unlikely to be any great difficulty. Games playing however will be somewhat more troublesome.

Reply to
John Rumm

I don't know. I will definitely give Ubuntu or it's successor another go in the future if I've got more time to try to sort out any problems. I think open source / free licence software will eventually knock Microsoft off it's spot, but it will take a few years. Microsoft can't compete with "free" for ever, provided the competition is good enough.

Reply to
David in Normandy

"tim....." wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net:

Agreed. Whatever issues there are with MS software (and there are many) these pale into insignificance next to the user-related, 'finger trouble' problems.

However, 'finger trouble' problems are often down to a combination of the complexity of the software product and the simplicity of the user ;). As someone who has spent (too many) years in the IT industry and made a good living out of it, I still remain to be convinced that PC- class technology is truly ready for business use. YMMV of course...

Reply to
Richard Perkin

In message , snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net writes

The days of incompatibility are, on the whole over

whe was the last time you found such a thing (well I did, last weekend ..., but)

Reply to
geoff

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