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I’ve written recently about my upgrade to Vista, and i have to say, I’m disappointed.  To be honest, I should have expected it given the exposure in the media and the professional press, but I always felt that it was maybe all too critical.  Well, I can tell you that from my own experience, Vista is a frustrating OS to have as your main system!

One of the reasons I went to Vista was that I liked the look and feel – it’s a clear improvement over XP – but I get the impression that all this visual wizadry is at the expense of system performance.  I have a 512Mb graphics card and 4Gb of main RAM, but my system is at best sluggish!

This presents me with a dilema:

• Either I revert back to XP and stick with an unsatisfactory Microsoft environment, but which gives me the same, fully compatible office suite as I use at work, as well as my preferred development environment – Visual Studio;
• or I make the move to Linux as my main OS, but sacrifice my office suite (OpenOffice is great, but not 100% compatible – particularly when using graphics) and my development environment!

I’ve been looking more into Linux recently, and found that the UI is way better than Vista, so from this angle, the move would be beneficial, however, I can’t go for looks alone!

So my call goes out to you – my loyal readers.  What would you do?  How can I overcome my own objections and be free to move to Linux?  How can I have my cake and eat it???!?

I look forward to your comments…. 

I used to work for a with a guy who was paranoid about keeping his laptop secure – even amongst friends.  He was also a heavy smoker so was forever needing to run out of internal meetings for a quick smoke, and every time he went, he’d lock his laptop (Ctrl-Alt-Del, then click on “Lock Computer”).

Now, one day, he’d been running a session that had over-run making him wait longer than normal for his cigarette.   When we did finally break, he hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and went out – leaving the menu visible to be canceled and the PC unlocked!  Our boss spotted this and found it quite amusing, so he went into the guys email and sent a message Read more…