Windows 7

[aero86]

under a minute, possibly slow?  that sounds kinda funny.  macs are nice, ive got an old imac as decoration above my computer desk.  they just arent cost effective for some people.  like me. lol.

anyways, i have a little bitty limited run emachines netbook, basically an acer.  was a walmart special.  got it for 220 at walmart.  spent 40 bucks for 2 gigs ram, and i love it.  it had 7 basic, but i upgraded to home premium.  runs it really well, and i love the netbook, even if it is small.  doesnt take it any time to load.   windows really did it right when the created 7. 

[mullet]

 Justin, The computer guy's at the geek store talked the wife into loading Kaspersky. She got Trojans, and and all kinds of Spyware. My notebook has Norton and I never had a problem. We wiped her's clean and switched to Norton and haven't had a problem.

[Justin Snyder]

Eddie, that is why I say it is still Windows. There just aren't any guarantees. Also why I say use a free service.

[gstoneberg]

I know but my Ubuntu's up to that in 15 seconds plugged in and 20 seconds on battery

You Ubuntu is command prompt, not something most people want to deal with. It doesn't need any virus protection though. It is awesome for programing and completely open source, what more could you ask for.

I run parallels with ubuntu on my mac and have it on a flash drive for my windows machine.

I know you're not bashing linux Justin, but Ubuntu is the first unix/linux I've used that isn't command line.  You can run it command line and I sometimes do, but even the install was all GUI and the defaults came up and worked right out of the box, even wireless networking and printing.  It honestly is as easy as windows and certainly faster.   I'm impressed with it and I've installed and run many linux and unix versions since I began using unix in 1983.  Most are command line, as you say, and that has kept me employed for a very long time.  I worked with the original AT&T as long as it existed, it was a fun ride.

I'm also impressed with your MAC's unix OS, easily the best graphics implementation out there.  If they weren't so pricy, I'd have one.

George

[Justin Snyder]

George, I actually just bought my first Mac. I am working on my bachelors in visual technologies (graphic arts) and have been using windows machines at home and Macs at school. The fact that Mac is based on Unix is what makes it more secure than Windows.

Ubuntu still requires a lot of command prompt for creating directories and creating files. EMACS and VI still has to be done using command prompt. They are making it a lot more user friendly. PCLinuxOS is supposed to look 50% like Windows, but I haven't tried it to see.

[gstoneberg]

Good luck on that Mac.  My older brother sure loves the Macs and we used to have a fruit computer vs UNIX debate every time we saw each other.  Mac OS-X stopped that and put us on the same side so to speak.

Actually, it doesn't.  I have yet to create a directory or a file using the command line on my Ubuntu laptop.  It has a graphics display of folders similar to windows explorer and I've used it to create all the folders I've needed.  I could use vi if I wanted, but so far at home I've used openoffice or the graphics text editor.  Like everybody else, at my core I'm lazy.  After working on computers all day, every day, when I get home I just want to relax and browse the NET before heading out to the shop.  If Windows did it better/faster than Ubuntu I'd have that loaded, but Ubuntu is faster, easier and doesn't get viruses.  Incidentally, I haven't used emacs since about 1995, but I sure used to love using it.  Alas, I got tired of having to load it every time I installed unix.  I do use vi heavily when I'm doing web programming, but then I'm over on my web server and, just like my windows PC at work, my Ubuntu PC at home is just the conduit to the server.  I honestly don't do much of that anymore as I'm learning C# and .NET these days.  I haven't tried PCLinuxOS either.

I don't mean to hijack this thread.  I have no experience with Windows7.  Even at work we don't yet have it.  My wife's laptop is getting long in the tooth so I suspect we'll get some experience here soon.  I sure hope it's better than XP, I don't even use the word Vista.

George

[Justin Snyder]

If you are going to run windows –and for most people it is the best idea– Windows7 is definitely the way to go.

George, what version are you running. I just looked at the 10.10beta and it looks nothing like what we were using. I don't know what version of ubuntu we were running on our virtual machines in my IT classes. We run about 10 virtual machines but 9 are cloned from the first and it was downloaded from the college server, not an Ubuntu forum. I wonder if they had the GUI partially disabled because we still had to do most of our work from the command line. I hate VI because of its modes. The version I have on my VM at home I tunneled in and cloned from the school. I only use Ubuntu for programming because it never crashes like windows does.

[gstoneberg]

I'm running 10.04. I don't do betas anymore.  My desktop looks just like the desktop picture on the website.  Sounds to me like you don't have the same GUI I do.  That's too bad, it really makes it a no-brainer.

But, like you say, Windows is the best choice for most people in the world.  I'm glad Windows7 is an improvement.

George