Lenovo makes deal in effort to curb piracy

Why bother investing so much when people get it for free. Although Vista is a good OS its not at the stage i would say for wide consumption. MS Office 07 also is not so great the learning curb is drastic from 97-2003.

Because now the computers will come with legit copies? Which means people won't have to get it free?

And it's a learning curve.

Originally posted by borhan9:

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Why bother investing so much when people get it for free. Although Vista is a good OS its not at the stage i would say for wide consumption. MS Office 07 also is not so great the learning curb is drastic from 97-2003.

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I agree completely. I used Vista on my laptop (not Vista ready but I bought it a month before they started making those stickers), and it seemed okay except UAC (which I disabled), and some programs would simply not work. My laptop is fully compatible however and graphically it looks nice (except I don't know why is Microsoft is so dark-grey and black happy). I had tried Beta 2 before that and that seemed okay too, but I thought UAC was going to be improved among other things as well. Not the case.

Unfortunately for me, I work at a computer shop where Vista makes us more money than XP now so I am compelled to sell it if I want to keep my job and the business in line.

Instead of being grumpy and keeping XP (which I am doing currently somewhat), I installed Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and customised it the way I like it exactly (as much as I could figure out). I got the video card working (ATI's Linux support sucks ass), and the wireless (Broadcom refuses to write any drivers for Linux ever). We are actually building a few Kubuntu machines at my work to sell because I requested to do so. I'm very happy to use Linux instead of keeping XP as its new to me and the more I learn the better I feel about it.

And companies currently are often keeping Windows 2000 and XP and do not plan to adopt Vista for a long time, if ever. "If it ain't broken, don't try to fix it." Yet Microsoft actually admits problems with XP and tries to sell Vista like the end of all the problems, which it is not. The PC manufacturers are only allowed to sell XP OEM till the end of this year and then Microsoft is hoping people will just use Vista and get used to it, which is what happened to me in order to get XP, but XP was actually a huge improvement. They've already ended Windows 2000 support (unless you pay some fees) and they will do this for XP probably really soon. XP also will not see DirectX 10, which is important for all gamers in the future.

My whole point is that rather than trying to stick with XP forever, which in my opinion cannot work, you have to get new stuff for new hardware, so even 5 years from now, if you put XP on a new PC just because you hate Vista or whatever it is then, it will probably run great but its still old and it will be unsupported and bugs will still be in the code.

If you are not interested in paying a high amount of money (or any money) for a new operating system, I would recommend a Linux distro. The costs for companies to develop on DirectX 10 will be much too high compared to developing with OpenGL, therefore making Wine compatiblity a snap in Linux and because of OpenGL companies may want to make games run natively in Linux in the future. With the SUSE/Microsoft agreements where they are attempting to make Windows and Linux more compatible with each other (really? or is Microsoft just trying to make their bad PR look good again?), developers may see the need to build native games for Linux finally. Regarding bugs, bugs actually get fixed in Linux, while in Windows XP, in the future, the bugs will not be taken care of, ever. For right now, I'm on my way to being totally switched to Linux.