Then the next questions are: (1) Have you ever gotten good support from a different OS?, and (2) Have you ever sued an OS when there were problems with it?

If not, what is the supposed benefit? If you are good at searching the web, there is better support out there than from paid organizations. Most official support you get these days are inexperienced people reading from scripts with a foreign accent you can barely understand.

Most of the embedded software for the Worlds ATMs was actually written by Students at Abertay University. Adamson at NCR in Dundee found it cheaper (free) to use students studying for their postgraduate mechatronics coursework than to actually employ professional programmers. The NCR ATMs didn't require much more processing power than a 80286 running Windows 3.1

The NSA backdoors in MS Windows only really appeared in Windows 98 or 98SE I believe from memory. Much of the UK Nuclear Missile Submarine fire control systems use Windows 2000. I wouldn't really worry about WinXP assuming that Service Pack 2 was installed to ensure greater stability.

I'm not terribly worried about WinXP going out of support in regards to ATM's. These machines should already be fairly well shut down regarding outside connections. They're not running webservers and BitTorrents. They don't have normal users viewing content from questionable websites, installing virus-infested programs, clicking on links in phishing emails, opening some unknown persons Excel spreadsheet with macros enabled, etc. I might even go so far as to guess that many of them have never seen a security update to their OS even when WinXP was supported.

I don't trust Windows for security on a normal user system. But on a dedicated single-function device like an ATM, it's probably not the end of the world if the OS goes off official support. At least not in the short term. I'm surprised that an engineer would base something like an ATM on an OS intended for end-user local computing. I certainly wouldn't have done that myself. But evidently the ATM engineers did exactly that, based on recent news reports. Or more likely, this news is being reported by idiots, as many news reports are, and the truth is ATM's may be based on some chopped down simplified OS that was originally derived from some components of WinXP. Which is not the same thing as saying "ATM's run WinXP".

Besides, if ATM's really ran a full blown version of WinXP, wouldn't that mean that they'd lock up on users frequently, have to be rebooted often, have their registry routinely cleaned, and have the whole OS reinstalled from scratch every year or two just to keep them running?

I've had at least three different tickets opened with Microsoft that were not fixed. One was at home for Microsoft Money, one with work for XPEmbedded and one for Server 2003's typeperf because it went from an unsupported resource kit tool in 2000 to integrated part of the OS in 2003 and supposedly supported. So closed source does not = well supported.

I've reported issues and asked for enhancements over the years with open source and had some implemented. The only ones that haven't so far are with Android since Google is driving the development primarily.

There are many companies such as Redhat which you can pay for support just like Microsoft/Apple and are free to sue just like Microsoft/Apple. I'd be surprised if anyone here has deep enough pockets to sue either anyway and with Apple's track record your more likely to get sued by them rather than sue them.

Yep, I am about done with Microsoft. I have forsaken MS Office in favor of open source apps that work better.

It is amazing how the big computer companies act so contemptible toward their end-users. IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, they all need a good dose of product rejection.

But Microsoft is by far the worst of the bunch. Their products suck. They are the epitome of a good concept poorly executed and forcibly marketed.

From now on, the first thing I will be doing with any new laptop/desktop unit I buy will be to wipe the hard drive and start over with something better. OEM Windows has had it.

Interesting comments. Thanks!

My office laptops are all going to Win 7. I only have one left to do, but it's an XP machine. It's going to be a royal pain to reload all my software and rebuild my archives and workspace.

Going forward, I suspect Win 7 is going to be harder to get. New licenses haven't been offered for a while. There's still old stock out there. As noted, business class PCs still offer the downgrade/upgrade option (Lenovo does this fix right at the factory). Wonder if bidding on eBay will heat up for Win7 packages?

All of my older/personal machines are moving to Linux. I spent the last year playing with different distros. I keep coming back to Lubuntu, which is light and fast, does all the web-browser stuff I need, and has a robust and problem-free installer. I added Chromium as a browser and avast! antivirus for on-demand scanning.

BTW, there are going to be a lot of freebies out there for Linux users. People and companies are starting to discard perfectly good XP machines.

How does one NOT use Microsoft Office? My job involves tracking changes in Microsoft Word. For that alone, I'm stuck with Office (I think).

The idea of using another operating system besides Windows or IOS intrigues me. But is it more trouble than it's worth? I really don't have time to figure out if it's more trouble than it's worth. I need someone else to tell me. I guess it's time for a Google search...

I'm stuck with Microsoft office at work too but thats their choice, their data, their risk. When Excel crashes and looses the last hour of changes thats on them.

You should not be working on work documents on your personal systems and vice versa. Even if the companies risk management doesn't forbid it you should not take the risk yourself.

I was experimenting with Linux anyway a few years ago when I first got XP and its many problems. I setup a dual boot and then would test out converting documents into the native Linux apps until i was able to use Linux more and Windows less. Eventually as I upgraded hdd's I quit installing the windows partition.

You can download a gpartd bootdisk nd repartition your drive for a dual boot but any time I make a major change I follow my normal backup routine then put a new drive in my system and clean setup what I want then plug my old drive into a usb enclosure and copy my data over.

I run my own business. My personal and business laptop are the same machine. I have never had problems with an Office document not saving. Actually, I don't have any noteworthy problems with Windows 7. I will just always listen to success stories from people who escaped the evil empire. I'll move away from Windows/Office for the principal of the matter.

In practice, that's essentially correct. If your work (like mine) requires you to be seamlessly interoperable with clients that operate in Microsoft Office, you need to run it. This is particularly true for complex documents. Sending an ugly mess back to the client makes you (and me) look incompetent. Not good for our businesses.

If you want to test drive an alternative, the OpenOffice/LibreOffice 4.0 (now 4.2?) office suite is free to download. They claim that interoperability with MS Office file formats is much improved from previous versions. LibreOffice is available for both Windows OS and Linux. I've been meaning to do some hardcore testing but haven't found time yet.



IMHO the best approach is to run a separate PC with Linux and see if it covers your bases. There are a lot of PC users who don't need the fully interoperable corporate suite; they mostly do everything through a web browser. For them, Linux can do everything they need done.

Linux also has WINE, a Windows emulator, that can in theory run a genuine MS Office suite within the Linux OS. I have a Linux box with the horsepower to do this, but just haven't found time to test it all. Interesting idea though.

Hope this is somewhat helpful.