Re: Formatting [was: Re: Grammar Crackdown]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:41:15 -0400, Roland Hutchinson
<my.spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Chuck Riggs wrote:

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:16:58 -0400, Roland Hutchinson
<my.spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Chuck Riggs wrote:

<snip>
... I have a large software library
that needs Windows. I don't want to fiddle with conversion programs
that are bound to slow games down. And so on.

Yes, the games are the showstopper for many users, as I have mentioned
elsetheread by now.

Do you know if they will run on Vista?

Most of them are major MS products, so my guess is they were all, at
least, tested on Vista before it was released.

Dual booting is always an option: boot into XP to play games, into Linux
for everything else (including running Windows apps other than games with
Wine or in a virtual machine).

I like the Linux Internet program, for one, so I might run Linux on a
second partition. If booting into it was quicker or if I could see
some other advantages it offered to having Vista by itself, I might
retain it on my next laptop. The awkwardness of the periodic updates
to various Linux programs is still a bugbear, AFAIC, unless there is
something about the routine I don't understand, which is very
possible.

What do you have in mind when you say "awkwardness".

I'm running Ubuntu, and the updates are painless and can be 100% automatic
for anything that's included in the distro (which is just about everything
you could want) or in the major supplementary repositories (e.g.
Mediabuntu).

Most distros have something similar, as long as you stick to packages
available through the distro's package manager.

If you are compiling and installing programs by hand, then you normally have
to update by hand, too. In general, this is not recommended.

Well, no Linux updates are made without my, uh, intimate assistance,
which I find especially annoying because the OS gives me the
impression I don't know what I'm doing, which is quite true. Linux is
operator unfriendly, as I said more than once back when I directed the
testing of new Navy software releases.
There may be a setting I need to change to automate the process, but I
haven't got a clue where to find it. I so hate updating anything on my
Asus that I put off even checking for updates. As long as the geeky
machine can access the Internet, my only reason for buying it, it will
remain a quickie alternative to my Sony laptop, running XP. As soon as
it irritates me more than it pleases me, it gets shitcanned for a new
Windows machine, not that I'm anxious to buy Vista when it still
contains a number of bugs, as any complex new software release must.
--

Regards,

Chuck Riggs
Near Dublin, Ireland
.