Interested to see what our user base uses.

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At home, W7 across the board.
It works well on everything. A big, pleasant surprise.
I'd have preferred Mac, but others here demand MS.

At the Office: still XP. I doubt we'll shift from MS there; too many professional/business apps still prefer it.

I personally avoid the MS supporting apps whenever possible. I try to avoid the constant security drama that the IE/Outlook/Word herd endures.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
I've got a MacBook Pro, 1st generation (circa 2006) that I use for work (audio and video production, web development and graphics and photography); but I no longer use it for anything *but* work, as it is beginning to show its age, in the late autumn perhaps of its life. When it was used for day-to-day stuff, I used Safari mostly, for its speed. I stuck mostly with Apple's built-in programs: Mail, iCal, iChat, etc. I installed my own Jabber server to allow iChat to use MSN, Google Talk.

The system I use for day-to-day computering is an old refurb that I bought for $80 with a P4 1.7GHz CPU, a $10 eBay-purchased NVIDIA M440-based video card and 512MB of RAM. It runs exceedingly well and stable with Debian Lenny (5.0.3) installed. It functions as our media center (hooked up to the TV to play movies, etc.), radio, phone (using Ekiga or Skype), communications Command Central, recipe database and BITOG portal. It uses the IceWeasel (Firefox, rebranded by the Debian folks to protest Mozilla's "non-free" licensing of the Firefox logo and name...) browser, version 3.0.x. I use NoScript and AdBlock Plus from the Debian repositories.

I also keep a very, very old IBM Thinkpad around with XP in a VM (Debian Lenny w/ no GUI as host) for my wife's high school software which only runs on corporate OS's. It runs Firefox 3.5 although, given the very minimal browsing that's done on it, given the minimal resources the poor laptop has, and given my wife's considerable acumen and savvy concerning safe browsing, I may begin using... gulp... IE8.



When in video/audio editing and creation I've always heard the Mac platform is the best for it as the apps are quite polished and robust. What are the spec's on the laptop unit, is this the G4/G5 equipped laptop or the first Intel based entry? Thats the funny thing about PC/Mac's.

Regardless if your running the same OS or apps, after time the machine does slow down, regardless of formatting and what have you. I noticed that my over 10 year old AMD Athlon 800mhz desktop up till recently was a beast in XP. It felt much faster than my Opteron 165 dual core gaming rig at the time with basic windows browsing and surfing. Machine was used for basically surfing the internet as a file server in its later years. It was fast until SP3 came along and it just chugged. I also find that today's programmers(not all of them, some of them) are burdened so much by deadlines that optimizations goto the way-side. Photoshop 4 to CS3 installation sizes nearly quintupled as an example.

I myself never tried Debian only its siblings(ubuntu/mint). Debian luckily has a very long support tunnel as they do not release updates as often as other distro's because they want things to work, and Debian does just that from all accounts on the forums.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: Volvohead
At home, W7 across the board.
It works well on everything. A big, pleasant surprise.
I'd have preferred Mac, but others here demand MS.

At the Office: still XP. I doubt we'll shift from MS there; too many professional/business apps still prefer it.

I personally avoid the MS supporting apps whenever possible. I try to avoid the constant security drama that the IE/Outlook/Word herd endures.


My home network has one machine on Windows 7(wife's gaming rig), her father's machine is running Windows Vista, machine needs a serious air dusting, just keep forgetting. It may experience death by dust. My Vostro 1500 on Mint 7. My parents home has just the one laptop with Vista and thats my brothers. I will hopefully be picking up a few spare parts to put together a machine for my mother to use as a good training/learning experience for her. I got her as far as the internet many moons ago, but now she just plays solitare. At least her mouse skills are good!
 
Work: Windows 7 64 bit, Windows Vista 64 bit.
Home: Windows 7 on the Dell laptop using Flock browser, Mac OSX 10.6 laptop, Ubuntu 9.04 and/or XP on a couple really old units, Windows 2008 Server R2 (64bit) on my main AMD machine.

Sometimes dabbling with Google Chrome and IE8, otherwise Firefox across the board.

Office products: Novell's (free) version of Openoffice 3.0 as it includes transparent support for Office 2007 docs w/o any additional plug-ins.
 
Lots of variety, more so than I imagined, lots of people dipping into the Linux world.
 
I dual boot between Windows 7 X86 with Firefox 3.5.5 and Gentoo Linux with Firefox 3.5.4
I have a small 40GB FAT 32 drive that I use to share files between them. The Firefox and Thunderbird directories are on this drive, so I have the same config either way.
 
Originally Posted By: Onmo'Eegusee
I dual boot between Windows 7 X86 with Firefox 3.5.5 and Gentoo Linux with Firefox 3.5.4
I have a small 40GB FAT 32 drive that I use to share files between them. The Firefox and Thunderbird directories are on this drive, so I have the same config either way.


Wow, Gentoo. I tried it a few years ago as I liked the freeBSD concept that you could rebuild your entire system from source whenever you wanted. But I eventually just came to the conclusion that the performance gains were small, at best, and it was starting to take longer and longer to complete the builds. So I switched over to Redhat then to CentOS (for servers) and later to Ubuntu (for the desktop).
 
Originally Posted By: Familyguy
Originally Posted By: Onmo'Eegusee
I dual boot between Windows 7 X86 with Firefox 3.5.5 and Gentoo Linux with Firefox 3.5.4
I have a small 40GB FAT 32 drive that I use to share files between them. The Firefox and Thunderbird directories are on this drive, so I have the same config either way.


Wow, Gentoo. I tried it a few years ago as I liked the freeBSD concept that you could rebuild your entire system from source whenever you wanted. But I eventually just came to the conclusion that the performance gains were small, at best, and it was starting to take longer and longer to complete the builds. So I switched over to Redhat then to CentOS (for servers) and later to Ubuntu (for the desktop).


The only time it ever takes awhile for me is if I don't boot it for months and everything is behind.
I also have a server/router I run Gentoo on. When I boot into Gentoo I can do distributed compilation with the server.
 
Never tried Gentoo, I know for awhile it was either Debian or Gentoo for a distro. Gentoo has the hassle of configuring it but was preferred for novice's to try and setup because you learn a lot from it.

Leo Laporte from "The Screensavers" and that Parillo guy would always recommend Gentoo Linux if a person was trying to get into the linux world.
 
I am currently running Windows Vista SP2 x64 on my main desktop. I ran W7 x64 for a couple of months. Browsing with latest Firefox browser.

For my netbook, I'm currently running Windows XP Home browsing w/ IE8. I've experimented with W7 and Ubuntu with my netbook and both are excellent OS'es.
 
My first "computer" was a Commodore my mother was borrowing from the school board.

My first PC was an 8088. This would have been 1988. I was running DOS 3.0 IIRC. I later upgraded it to DOS 5.0, then 6.0, then 6.2, and then 6.22. I still have the disks. I also had Windows 2.0 at one point, and Windows 3.0.

I then ended up with an IBM 486 SX/25. I ran Windows 3.1, then WFWG, 3.11. I replaced it with FreeBSD. Then Slackware Linux. Then FreeBSD again. Then Windows 95, then FreeBSD, then 95B.

I then had a Texas Instruments Travelmate Notebook, 2MB of RAM, that I ran Windows 3.11 on. I installed Windows 95 on it from floppies. I still had the desktop at this time as well.

I was in grade 9 at this point, and began taking computer courses at the local University my dad was teaching at. Systems I had access to, and used, were some DEC ALPHA boxes, a 486 running OS/2 Warp, and a few HP-UX systems.

My 486 desktop was upgraded to 48MB of RAM and a 1.6GB hard drive. I was a beta tester for Microsoft, and it was my Windows 98 beta test box. After Windows 98 testing was complete, it ended up with FreeBSD on it again.

I then got a Toshiba 330CDT notebook. Pentium CPU at 266Mhz and 64MB of RAM. It came with Windows 98SE on it. It then got FreeBSD. And then it got Redhat Linux. And then I started beta testing NT5.0, so it got that. I still had my 486, which was back to running FreeBSD and operated as a firewall and test box.

Through the NT5 testing and subsequent renaming to Windows 2000, I dabbled with more Redhat and FreeBSD.

I was then the "bad" guy in my MCSE class that installed RedHat and Mandrake on my classroom PC. At this time I got to play with IRIX quite a bit.

Since that point, I've had far too many systems to list. I've done Yellowdog Linux on my MAC notebook, Hackintosh (OSX) on a couple of systems, and run FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Suse, Solaris, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, Slackware (current), Windows Vista, XP-64, XP, Vista-64, 7-beta's and RC, 7 64 (current), Mandrake, Lindows, BeOS, OpenSolaris, Sabayon...etc. As well as a good sized list of firewall distro's.

Browser choice over the years has been everything from Mosaic and Lynx through the original IE, then Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox, Chrome, all the IE iterations and a few goofy ones that no longer exist.
 
Overkill, OS/2 Warp! Not many of us have ever really used that one. I finally got it running in a VM on my Mac :) My how things have changed. Oh the joy of troubleshooting those "trap" errors.

BeOS anyone?
 
Originally Posted By: Anies
When in video/audio editing and creation I've always heard the Mac platform is the best for it as the apps are quite polished and robust.


I use the Final Cut suite for video, but actually prefered Sony Vegas for editing when I used to use Windows. I use Logic Pro for audio production, but prefered Steinberg's Nuendo. I use the Adobe Creative Suite as well. I made the switch because 1) I was tired of Windows, and 2) The MacBook Pro was the first laptop that kicked enough tail to do everything I needed to do.

Originally Posted By: Anies
What are the spec's on the laptop unit, is this the G4/G5 equipped laptop or the first Intel based entry? Thats the funny thing about PC/Mac's.


Mine is the first generation of Intel. 2.0 GHz dual core as I recall.

Originally Posted By: Anies
I myself never tried Debian only its siblings(ubuntu/mint). Debian luckily has a very long support tunnel as they do not release updates as often as other distro's because they want things to work, and Debian does just that from all accounts on the forums.


Debian (stable), while being a bit more involved to set up and make play nice with your hardware optimally, is ridiculously stable. Quite out-of-date in terms of the versions of the applications they use (in stable), but *very* well tested and tweaked to work really well. They're also a bit more strict about the "freedom" part of free software (in relation to Ubuntu and Mint), which I support fully.
 
TNS - I gave OS/2 Warp a try but couldn't get it running properly. As I recall you could drag a document onto a printer icon to start printing the doc. Preemptive multitasking too!
wink.gif
 
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