Upgrading A New PC To Windows 8 Will Cost You... $14.99

Go figure. Bill probably wants to pick up a few extra billion before Christmas shopping season.

Maybe it's just my imagination, but Win 8 will probably be garbage. Anybody with XP or Win 7 should stay with what they have. Every other version seems to be junk...............fortunately I missed Vista.

For a long time I ran 98SE vowing never to upgrade to XP. Never is a long time. After I got used to it I didn't want to go back. (Qualifier: driver upgrades, etc. made it tortuous to try to stay with 98SE.) So, similarly, I have had no desire to move to Vista (esp. after the horror stories I read online) or v7. People do tend to like v7 from most accounts I've seen. I've never used it but suspect media to be more integrated. Everything is so media centered these days, and "upgrades" are job security in the software world. So eventually, it's like trying to live in an audio cassette world today. (Did I mention I still buy cassettes for 20 cents a piece from a local used bookstore? I also own several stereo cassette decks, as well as a few VCRs. And, of course, I still own my first computer -- an Atari 1040ST -- though not still set up.)

I don't mind Win 7 and liked XP too. Before XP it was ME which was junk. Hopefully my computer lasts long enough that I can skip 8 and go to whatever is next.

Well, I've threatened for years to get a Linux box to play around with, but never have gotten around to it. It's the variety of app. choices that help keep people so attached to Windows that they don't explore Linux. Plus the learning curve. That may never change. I know there are some Linux users here.

I actually set up my current machine, where I could boot up in win 7 or Linux.

I know there are some linux lovers out there..................since I wasn't having any issues with win 7, I was too lazy to bother learning the Linux OS. It's kind of a pain to undo the dual boot too.

I couldn't get my laptop to dual boot Debian, then it wouldn't boot Win 7, so I booted with a Debian DVD and selected the option to set up an encrypted LVM on the hard drive. Wiped windows, installed Debian.

The advantage for me is the thousands of free programs I can install for free! Packages that come with Debian are programs that have been compiled, tested, and debugged. There are 28,855 packages, some of them are cheesy, some are excellent, but they are all free. Some of the 311 packages listed under mathematics might be of interest to engineers. I use the handy desktop calculator, but if some one wanted to analytically compute the derivative of a function at a given inner point of its domain (whatever that is), there's stuff for that too.

Allow me to translate. The patch to finish Windows 7 will cost $15.

I'm just kidding, I never had a single problem in over two week of using the Windows 7 that came installed on my new laptop (other than it's inability to dual boot, no routing, the constant interruptions of pop-ups, it's need for anti-virus software, and of course the EULA). I remember it being real pretty though, and I still miss 'Chess Titans'.