Bwcad1 wrote:im so tired of the ANTI MICROSOFT/INTEL boners.
Although it's OT, I don't particularly have any reason TO upgrade. They didn't put anything new in Vista except the new DirectX, which I'll have to upgrade my video card for anyway. The slow downs because of the new graphics are the opposite of what I want since I'm a minimalist. I run XP with the classic GUI and I turn off all the bells and whistles.
I guess it really just depends if it suits you or not.
/offtopic
first: avoid Vista, at least till a service pack is out for it.
up to 25% hit in performance compared to XP. especially in games since there's no OpenGL support in Vista at all, and the hardware requirements are horrid for Vista. Stick to XP. tomshardware.com has a great comparison review between XP and Vista.
secondly, prebuilt machines are cheaper. period. reason is they buy parts in quantities of ten thousand units, giving them price breaks you couldn't imagine. You build the PC yourself and you pay discounted retail from distributors and vendors. Advantage to building your own is that you get better parts for what you spend, and you get to build it exactly how you wish with replaceable industry standard parts.
I just built a fairly nice system for a lady I know here for under $600, including a 19" 8ms LCD, nVidia graphics, 1GB DDR, 200GB HDD, Athlon64 3500+, card reader, DVD ROM, DVD/RW, 802.11b/g, 100Mbit LAN, 56k modem, keybd/mouse/speakers, Windows XP MCE, and software.
That was "installed and delivered"
The reason I got it that cheap was I bought a Gateway box and added the LCD and wifi. The rest was a package deal I couldn't approach buying the parts myself.
Bwcad1 wrote:im so tired of the ANTI MICROSOFT/INTEL boners.
He probably types this from Firefox
j/k
I do like a lot of aspects of Linux systems, though. It's exceptionally stable, secure, tech support is great, can run on a wide range of hardware, interoperates with other systems like Windows 95/NT, Mac, Unix, IBM OS/2, Netware. There are advantages to open source-tens of thousands of programmers have reviewed the source code to improve upon it, where no other OS has undergone that level of review. It's like having a democracy, except the only ones that can participate and make a difference are intelligent people that actually understand how it works If only America were like that
If only America were like that 
