When I bought my used laptop and told the salesguy that I was going to put Linux on it, he told me he's been hearing more and more of the same lately.

It is probably possible to upgrade a slightly older desktop to Vista for $100. The only question is why? The Vista with all of the features is the most expensive version and the one requiring the most hardware upgrades. The lower end version is at best an incremental upgrade from XP and with the built-in DRM, you have to wonder who it is designed to satisfy, the end user or the RIAA, et al.

Since Microsoft will probably shut down support for XP within a few years, including necessary security updates, it's a good time to decide where to go. If one looks at the main purpose of most PC's, which besides games is usually Internet, Word Processing, and spreadsheet/accounting/taxes, then the question is what platform will safely run on older PC's without leaving them open to viruses.

Once Microsoft withdraws support for XP the answer is probably Linux. If consumers begin to realize that they can keep their 3-year-old machines without having to shell out another $500 simply by installing and learning how to use a desktop that really doesn't look that different than Windows, than you will see a small but significant shift to Linux.

XP Drivers and support
 

Rich,

XP has support and patches until 2014. Office 2003 has support and patches until then as well. Windows 2000 has support and patches until 2010.

The problem is buying a new copy of Windows XP, which you won't be able to do unless you have a corporate license starting next year. You can still get new XP machines from Dell and other corporate resellers.

I think we'll be seeing an uptick in Linux and OS X usage when this happens.

Mitch

When I think about how far the windowing systems for Linux will have come by 2014 I get a little happy in the pants. They are already pretty impressive.

I will use XP until the time comes that most new software will not run on it.

The only reason I still use any kind of Windows at all is because there aren't a lot of games I've seen that run on a Linux machine.

Are there any games that run with ubuntu linux?

There's a few that you can get with the synaptic package manager, and a lot of older games will run with Wine. I'm hoping SimCity 2000 will work on it.

Cedega
 

And if you want to pay a little money to get current games working, you can use Transgaming from Cedega to run the newer ones and get wizard-based installation.

The scary part is that most newer games tested under Cedega run faster under Linux/Cedega than under Vista.

My old 500 MHz Desktop from 1998 runs faster under Linux than my 2.0 GHz craptop from 2 months ago running under Vista.

I'd have the laptop run Linux, but I'm having a problem with Ubuntu and my nVidia GeForce 6150 that's integrated in it. Is there a different distro that works better with nVidia?

Cedega is seriously bad-ass. It's not very expensive and it's a lot easier than trying to do the same things with vanilla Wine.

Also, if you've got a Mac you can boot Windows with Boot Camp. And if you're willing to shell out $50 you can run Windows inside Mac OS, either in a VM or from your Boot Camp partition.

So many good alternatives to having a primarily Windows machine now. Even if you do sometimes run Windows for your gaming habit.

Slackware is good if you're not afraid of dirty hands. Knoppix might also be a good option.

What particular issue are you having? I've got quite a lot of experience getting things sorted between Linux and nvidia...But seriously, who needs X? j/k :rolleyes:

Well, it loads up just fine, then I get a gray box on a blue screen that says X Server has failed to start. If I use the onboard Intel graphics, I don't get the problem (with my 2.7 GHz desktop). On my laptop, I get this weird screen that is a bunch of horizontal lines, and it changes colors, then settles on black and dark grey, and doesn't do anything else. The only reason my laptop still has windows is because of this issue. I'd like to get it solved, and tell Gates to shove it.

no no no and no

It's official. My laptop has been ridden of the evil Micro$oft. Kubuntu all the way.

Did your laptop spin around a few times and growl as you excised MS from it? :p