Mar

5

I am not at all computer literate, so this might be useful to others who are not.

I have generally not had problems with Microsoft. I have had no problems with WindowsXP and OfficeXP, although prior to the release of IE7, I thought IE6 was very poor. But I got around that by using Firefox and/or Opera.

Anyway, I find WindowsVista to be so outrageous that I have determined never to use it. My current laptop and wife's computer are WindowsXP machines, and I figure both have a two-year lifespan left. So I took an older Dell and installed Ubuntu on it. I totally wiped out WindowsXP, so I don't have two partitions.

The problem with leaving the Microsoft world is some of the applications. Now, OpenOffice actually seems to be pretty good. But I regularly use Crystal Ball, which is an Excel add-in. I suppose I could hope for it to be available on Linux in two years. But my question is, what do Linux guys do? How do they deal with the fact that most business software is Windows only?

Anyway, the install went quickly and there were no problems. It has sped up the computer compared to how it ran with WindowsXP. The multimedia packages don't have the codecs for mp3s, but a quick question about that to a message board got me the answers I needed.

I intend to use this computer frequently for the next two years as training for a planned ditching of Microsoft altogether.


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