In some parts of the world your beliefs can get you killed.

I saw either Win 1.or 2. (on an IBM machine) best way to describe it was quaint and clunky but by Win 3.11 M$ had developed a reasonably useable interface on relatively inexpensive machines. My first Win 3 was a M$ special i wanted the Win interface for Word and Excel and M$ loaded in Win 3 for almost nothing really good deal 3 for about the price of 1 Application.

The move to Win 9x was a rocky affair and having looked at Win 95 and Win NT 3.5 I went 32 bit in 95 M$ finally got its act together with 98 and then upended itself with ME. The 98SE/NT4SP4 interface represented a friendly easily navigated interface the move to XP to be pretty and look like the mac to some extent has to my mind been a step backwards. I use classic view straight into Control panel not navigating 3 or 4 dialogs to get to what you want.

While I use M$ products I believe that we need several platforms hardware and software. If there was a real monopoly then we would have less pressure on M$ to provide a reasonable product. macs and Linux provide that necessary diversity and make the overal computing experince less vunerable to viruses that focus on one platform. if Macs and Linux held a similar proportion of the market to M$ they would be subject to similar levels of attck as the M$ platform. I am not saying one plafrom is more resistant to attacks just that the hackers would focus a similar level of effort to penetrate the other platforms

I agree with you, Brendan Falvey. Just take a look what happened to FireFox. FireFox is widely recommended as replacement for IE (not really the case though), also subject to secutiry hole. If Mac is widely used (hopefully) and gained more attention for hacker, I believe more security hole and virus will be discoved.

What is apple going to do when they are using Intel products? Are they going to lower the price and be competitive with Dell and Hp? Many people when it comes to products have bias fanfare when it comes to judging their products. I was using the G5 at the school and couldnt figure out how to make it go full screen. I guess thre user friendliness of hte apple was not so friendly to me. Xp is pretty user friendly actually most of it is intuitive. It may be differnt if i had started using apples instead.

Now, this system I just built, ask yourself if you can get this for htep rice through any oem and most of the parts to this system have 3 year warranties included. Abit is outstanding with their customer service, my poewrsupply to my system not this one that i built, replaced the board within 2 weeks i got it back and the board got fried because of the powersupply and they replaced it no problems same as the powersupply, in this fashion you get so much more for you money and security. Below the specs, i bought all the pieces form separate retailers on the internet, most from newegg. $946.00

$946.00
AMD 3500+ venice core
Abit AX8 K8T890
2 x 512mb pc3200 kingston running dual channeled
160gb sata 7200rpm 8mb cache caviar hardrive
x600XT ATI pci xpress 128mb hardrive
16x sony dvd dual layer dvd burner
7-1 reader mitsumi
500w powersupply mge vigor dual fan
Foxconn tooless case
Xp professional edition
scroll mouse and keyboard

For the warranty coverage included who is going to provide the above specs for the price? And the ram included. The board takes up to 6 ide devices has 3 ide sockets and 4 satas. dual floppy as well. Board works awesome it is just phenomenal, the only issue is the sata drivers to install windows, have to get hte 1.33 version if you hve recieved the floppy with 1.00version because windows doesnt recognize the controller for the sata drives. I install Xp pro in less than 8 minutes!!!!!! An install of Xp pro in less than 8 minutes is awesome, my 3200+ winchester installs less than 8 minutes with my K8T800pro chipset AV8 abit board i have.