Windows XP Extensions Reflect Vista's Woes

A survey released in October by the United Kingdom's Corporate IT Forum showed that only 4% of businesses in that country are using Windows Vista on workplace systems, while 35% said they were "not yet interested" in Vista. Fifty-eight percent said they were still using Windows XP, now 7 years old.

Once a dog, always a dog.

Win XP, while not great, is plenty good enough for most tasks, especially since Vista won't run my legacy software very well, and in some cases, not at all. The major exception to XP's utility is web-browsing. For that, I recommend downloading the ISO image of your chosen flavor of Linux to create a live disk, a bootable CD that will let you take a no-risk test spin.

Firefox comes standard with most Linux flavors, and, while not completely immune to malware - (nothing is) - Firefox is a much-less risky proposition than IE. If you like what you see/experience, it's a relatively minor task to repartition your hard drive to create a dual-boot system. All of my frequently-used applications run under XP, but I always boot over to Mepis for web tasks.

As it stands today, I will purchase another XP system before M$ pulls the plug. It also will be a dual-boot box, possibly running Ubuntu or LinuxMint. All of the various Linux flavors install with a wealth of included software for most tasks. For example, Konqueror, the file manager packaged with Mepis also functions as an FTP client.

Did I mention I can see my Win XP partition from within Mepis?

Head on over to DistroWatch, and peruse their Top Ten Distros page to get a synopsis of the pros and cons of the most popular flavors of Linux. Understand that some of these distros are built on top of others, such as Ubuntu and Debian. All of the top 20 or so have a large and active support community, so help is available.

I'm using Mepis, which has now slipped out of the Top 10 to 14th, according to DW's survey, but Mepis is rock-solid. The major stumbling block I've experienced with Mepis is getting my Wacom graphics tablets to function well. However, they work flawlessly under XP, the continuing viability of which means that I won't be forced into upgrading any of my software, and that is very good news.

As a frugal pragmatist, my year-end recommendation is a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP and Linux.

Happy Holidays

S