http://www.ubuntu.com/dell Ubuntu is available from Dell although I have never used it. I have tried a smaller Linux distro called Puppy Linux. So small, you can completely boot it from a CD ROM with an additional 250MB file on your hard drive. Neat to have in case your Windows OS won't boot! I have friends that comment that Ubuntu Beryl is far superior to Windows Vista Aero. It runs faster and without choppiness when several windows are open. The problem I have with Linux is that it is a tinkerers paradise. I don't like to tinker, I want to buy a computer and use it but for others who love to install and configure stuff, Linux is a dream come true. Pete
Putting Vista on a pc is like putting five tons of bricks in the back of a 4 cylinder pickup truck and wondering why it's slower. Why on earth people choose to do this is beyond me. As for Dell and the other scams out there, any company who wants to know who I am and how much money I have before they will show me what they have for sale is not the company I choose to do business with. XP works fine. It ain't broke. Don't fix it or you will be fixing it. As for Microsoft, all they do is put a new dress on the same pig and charge you 5,000 times what it costs them. How else do you think Gates became one of the richest men in the history of our planet? Not by giving you a good value; that's for sure. If you watch the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" you will see that Gates created none of that. He stole every bit of it. He's a criminal who should be in prison. As long as we have a Republican administration though, he's scott free along with the investment bankers who steal money in the futures markets running things limit up and limit down in the same session to steal money. My XP works fine and I build my own computers now. It's the only way I know to have a modern machine that is not bogged down with five ISP trials and harasses you trying to sell you this and that all day long. Would you buy a car that forced you to stop at Starbucks every morning and buy a $10 cup of coffee? Then why do you pay Michael Dell to force you to have AOL and all that other crap on a pc? Building PC's is simple. Everyone should learn how to do it. And there should be more information out there on how to do it. The research I did to build my first one did take longer then reasonable, but its' behind me. The theory behind Linux is great. A free OS. I tried it but it's just not there yet. Give it time and hopefully Microsoft will have to learn to make an honest living or die. Everything they sell can be had for free somewhere on the internet from Office and Outlook to OS programs and everything else. Give it time. As with the credit markets, in due time it will come to balance.
Opera and Firefox are both free, open-source, and FAR superior to Explorer. Hopefully, we'll have the same in an OS soon. And then Microsoft can be shorted all the way down to bankruptcy.
xp > w00, >>>> w98. i won't go to vista, no need, it's a memory hog, etc. firefox rocks my world, i switched from opera because of some opera performance issues. i love firefox's add-ons...
Offtopic, but it is Sunday. This is rather dumb, like saying building cars is easy, everybody should build there own cars. Or houses.(I mean, couple of dorrs, windows...) The point is, what advantage do I have with a homebuilt computer? A brand computer is cheaper and it has warranty. It is much faster to remove unwanted software than to learn how to build a computer. Or you can buy Acer with very few extra software on. Unless you are a geek or interested in it, there is absolutely no reason to build a computer even if it is relatively simple...
The basics of putting togther a pc are quite simple altho you do need to be aware there are some specific problems that are quite difficult and may require some research to figure out. The advantage is that you can get a much more powerfull pc if you buy parts offline from companies for the same price that you would if you just walked into a store and and bought an already built one. Also if you have preferances you can get exactly what you want. When I built my computer it cost me about $1800 to get togther. if i bought it in a store it would have been upwards of $2500.
That is exactly what I did about two months ago. I'm not a big dell fan, but there was no way I was going to be forced to buy a computer with Vista on it.