My laptop with WinXP keeps on having periods where it is crashing/showing BSODs up to 6 times in 30 minutes. Really! I bought extra memory, scandisk-ed the HD .... I won't say XP sucks, its probably some peculiarity with my hardware. But tonight is again one of those BSODs nights. Maybe the virus scanner got updated, and is making my laptop crash, maybe it is the XP-Win-update that is automatically being downloaded while i type this ....

But i KNOW it is making me put effort in looking for another OS. I have been testing Xandros (great distro, but as newbie you're (or at least feel) limited to the software Xandros certified for their distro), Lindows/Linspire (great distro for newbies), Debian (actually Xebian, which i put onto my Xbox) and other stuff (at work we use Novell Netware & Groupwise, and Novell is beta-ing interesting Linux-stuff currently)...

I know there IS a lot wrong with Linux. It has improved impressively on install-friendliness & usagability, but it still has some rough edges (especially manageability in enterprise-environments). But i've already replaced Outlook with Thunderbird (it imported all ofmy data, but the current version does not have a Calendar-item; there is a plug-in, but it's not stable yet), and i'm using Firefox for browsing... I'm even moving my mail from hotmail to gmail (maybe a little overdone?). Anyway: i do encourage others to move their data to applications that are NOT closed, as most MS-apps are...

Hope i can finish this before the next BSOD... Regards,

Raoul.