IF it weren't for Windows you wouldn't BE here? Who ya talkin' at? I have not touched a Windows machine at home -- except occasionally a laptop brought home from the office for particular projects -- for, let me see -- fourteen years. WHile I have often had to use one at work, being a dumpkopf salary man, I have, over the years, seen MASSIVE amounts of production time being lost on Wintel machines which required tweaking, re-setup, registry adjustments, interrupt settings adjustments, lengthy data-recovery hassles due to crashes, and device adjustment, driver reinstallation, etc, etc, etc. I will not say these things never happened at home on my Macs. A few of them did, most of them never did, and those that did were generally FAR easier to remedy.

Craig's viewpoint is correct in many respects -- if you added up all the time American working folk have spent trying to get Microsoft products to behave as advertised, it would be worth many of Bill Gates' billions. Unfortunately, it is considered to be a normal concomitant of the computer business, because they are "so complex".

I will say, on the other hand, that Win 2K Pro has behaved admirably well and caused very few headaches since I have been using it at work.

By the way there are "Office-compatible" software packages out there designed to run on Linux and other UNIX systems, such as the Star Suite. I do not have details on their performance, though.

Regards,


A