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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (62250)	10/28/2001 11:42:35 AM
From: tbigb	Respond to of 74651

Dybdahl : you should stick to talking about Linux features. You don't know what you are talking about. Go buy a copy of windows XP with a new computer and set it up and tell me what you experience.

To: dybdahl who wrote (62250)	10/28/2001 12:16:48 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74651

Lars - re: "People hate crashes, computers that take a long time to boot, computers you have to shut down before turning off, computers with a configuration that can get corrupted, computers that you cannot let your 8 y.o. child install software on etc" You have exactly listed the most obvious benefits of XP, and why people will want it. Except that you have set the bar too high - my 5 year old daughter has XP (RC1) on her laptop and enjoys all of those benefits. In addition she can make hardware changes herself. She installed an 80211b card on the laptop - I was a little slow in getting around to it so she took matters into her own hands. Her friends are playing interactive internet games and she wanted to be able to play while wandering around the house (she had already mastered plugging in the RJ45 ethernet jack but being tied to a cable, like being tied to a power cord, was too confining for a 5 year old). Try that on a playstation!! We of course have playstation and Nintendo in all of their variants, including everything we need to run them in the car on long trips. But the laptop running XP has become the device of choice for the younger children (5 yrs and 8 yrs old) because it is self contained, you don't need a TV, and it does so much more. The laptop does not need to be plugged in, has its own display, can play movies and do homework in addition to the games, and is much more forgiving of abuse than the playstation or nintendo. For example, if you shut the lid on the laptop it goes into standby, saving your context exactly. Open the lid and you are ready to go in a few seconds. Pull the plug on your playstation and you are back to where you were at your last save, if you saved... The laptop will save the standby settings for a week or so but if you forget to turn it back on and the battery eventually runs down, it will hibernate, saving the context to disk. That takes more like 20 seconds to restore, but still faster than playstation. And that's a general purpose computer, not a game machine. A similar configuration actually optimized for small children would doubtless be better yet. There are many children's sites which support games and other interactivities which based on personal experience are much more attractive to small children than stand alone games - it's the same kind of thing that made AOL instant messaging popular with the teen-age set. Kids like to interact, and the ability to do that without having to talk mommy into driving over to Susie's house gives the kids the autonomy to do that, and parents don't have the additional hassle of coordinating the kids schedules to make it happen. <EDIT> My 8 year old just installed a package which allows him to play playstation games on his laptop. It supports the playstation game controls via a USB adapter. And it adds the ability to save context without intervention. I am betting that the playstation rig goes into the closet if this package works as advertised. BTW, I had nothing to do with buying or installing the playstation emulation package - he bought it out of his allowance and installed it himself. Also - the laptops the kids have are older ones I gave them when I replaced mine - they are 300 MHz pentium. They loaded and ran XP just fine with no need to hunt up drivers or anything, the smoothest install I have done on a laptop. <EDIT 2> I forgot to mention digital photography. I bought my 8 year old son a "JamCam" last Christmans for $50... he takes the camera and laptop to scout camping, soccer games and the like and downloads the pictires to the laptop in the field. Yet another thing you can't do with a game console. Also took his laptop and Intel USB microscope to school for show and tell and amazed his teacher and friends... there is lots of neat stuff for kids out there.