[Scott]

Why do people hate MS so much? There a company, selling a product. You do not have to buy it if you don't want to. They were simply the first to get all the market share and no one else tried to compete at the time. Why does anyone have the right to blame them for what they did/do? Buggy or not, MS advanced alot of stuff with computers. What would there be without MS? I know you'll say Linux, but what if MS wasen't there to start it, maybe we'd all be blaiming linux, it has BUGS also, and with almost every 'major' update with Linux you have to completly re-write most software for it. Redhat 9 was pretty buggy, releasing TONS of patches all the time. RHEL came out and almost everything had to be switched over. Almost nothing from RH9 worked with RHEL in my case.

I wasen't a big fan of windows 98SE, liked ME, and never owned 2000. But never have I had any major problems with any of there os's. XP is stable as a rock and not buggy at all for me. Maybe it's the general lack of computing knowledge that get people in trouble there. If it don't work blame MS right? I say blame yourself, cause I'm up and running A+ with my same copy of windows, and have had it installed on 4 other computers that I have built and everything works flawless.

Updates come with every software you own. Even my firewall which is supposed to be 'secure' is patched every few months because of new flaws found in the software.

Why your calling any MS product a disaster is beyond me. Every OS MS made has advanced computers in some way, making new technologys work better with the OS. Think of things you could do on windows 95, now think about 98, and then ME, and then XP. Every OS offered something diffrent. Every OS was faster then the previous. Every OS had new bugs. EVERY SOFTWARE HAS BUGS. Even my damn car which I paid $22,000 for has a few BUGS. Get over it...

There price tags might be a little high. But it's no diffrent there your cable company jacking up prices because they own the market in your area. If they had to 'share' cable lines we'd all have 10mb cable for $15/mo. It's the competition that's lacking there. Don't blame company A for having a better product, blame company B for not creating the competition.

BTW I installed windows XP on a Dell PII 400 Mhz with 32MB of ram and it ran fine. Slow, but it still ran, even with the XP theme.