OT: Windows 2000 Pro to XP Pro upgrade without having to reinstall applications?

[The Natural Philosopher]

nearly ALL legacy printers and MOST older scanners work on Linux. At least as far as a basic scan to image goes.

Scanner support is actually one of the worst aspects of Linux these days. But its the newer ones that dont work..it takes time to reverse engineer them and come up with drivers. A few latest greatest printrers too are somewhat unsupported, though I have usually found something 'close enough' that to all intents and purposes works.

With printers since OS-X uses the same underlying print system, the PPDs 'printer description files - are generally available on Linux now as well. You can steal them off the 'installation' DVD'

scanners need to be checked thoroughly

There is some ability to get 'close enough' but some simply wont work at all, and others may in fact burn out if driven past the endstops etc.

If there is one piece of crud left in Linux, its SANE.

[The Natural Philosopher]

MInt is all herbal..cinnamon etc ..

Mine is based on 'precise pangolin' ubuntu IIRC

Apart from the name, it seems pretty good really.

I probably will go up two releases and reinstall EVERYTHING sometime this year :-)

[Tim Streater]

For at least the last 4 OS X major releases, all I've done is install the OS and then carry on (except when I've changed hardware). It even remembers my minor tweaks, such as minor changes to the apache config file, etc. I have difficulty understanding why any of my apps should be involved.

[Scion]

Tony Bryer put finger to keyboard:

Control-P?

[Eric]

Some of us have a clue.

I've been running cracked XP Pro for 10 years, brother cracked Win 7 for

3 years. I've installed many hacked/crack programs over the years and never had a virus or any other kind of shit. That includes software that costs £3,000+.

[Huge]

Translation: "I am a thief."

[Adrian]

Which, of course, doesn't make it in any way a legitimate copy - and if it's a key that's that easy to find, there's a very good chance that you may suddenly find updates etc failing to work since MS have blocked it.

If you're going to use commercial closed-source pay-to-use software, that's fine - but do it properly and legally, and PAY to use it. Don't steal it.

[Tim Streater]

Only twenty quid or so, these days. Used to be a lot more.

And also these days, you don't even get the option to do a clean install with OS X; there's just "install" (course you can wipe the disk yourself if you want to). But I've not needed to - I don't even bother with a backup, and that's been the case for 6 years or so. Again, of course, in principle I could restore the OS from Time Machine that just pootles away in the background.

The only fly at the moment is that Silverfast hasn't updated their driver for my Microtek Filmscan 2700 scanner, but I could probably install SnowLeopard in a VM if I needed to do any work on that. I've got XP in a VM so I can run Publisher.

[Mark]

Jeez, you can download win7 Ultimate for free from softpedia and a working corporate key is easy to find the Ultimate download will also install as Pro or Home if you have a key i.e laptop with no re-install disc.

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[Mark]

True but i just don't have any sense of morals where Microsoft is concerned they have made a fortune with restrictive licensing so it's an eye for an eye.

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[dennis]

Acrobat has never been included in windows, its a product of Adobe. Until recently it was patented and you couldn't include anything for reading PDFs.

Maybe the win 8.1 update will fix it? It will at the least allow to option to go straight to the desktop.

Just include an option to install one of the solutions.

[dennis]

I think you will find that if it has the oomph for XP then win7 or win8 will be fine.

[John Rumm]

If you can cope with the command line:

xcopy source dest /s/e/c/h/z

(switches control sub dirs, include empty ones, continue after errors, copy hidden files, and do network files in restartable mode)

Failing that, a utility like DirSyncPro is quite handy for doing more complicated sync operations.

(note also the explorer copy dialogue in Win 7 is better than in XP - its still not "good", but its better!)

[dennis]

Most of the time linux users are comparing linux to XP and that was released twice as long ago.

[The Other Mike]

Adobe published the format around twenty years ago and it's been an ISO standard for nearly five years.

[polygonum]

I rather suspect you mean Adobe Reader.

Which, even though the rights are owned by Adobe, is available to be distributed by filling in a simple license agreement:

[SteveW]

Windows 8 Pro, plus a free download of Classic Start Menu gives you an up to date operating system that looks like whichever version of Windows you choose. I got two copies of Win 8 when they were £25 a piece before the end of January and both have been running very well - one on a fairly modern PC and the other on a somewhat older one.

SteveW

[The Natural Philosopher]

That's only because XP ceased to be better than linux in any way about that time ago.

Linux users haven't bothered to look at windows since then. It didnt have anyuthiung they wanted or needed.

[Eric]

I was telling him what to do, not what I do.

[Eric]

Microsoft have also been caught for stealing IP from other software companies.