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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gottfried who wrote (4774)	1/6/2003 12:15:48 PM
From: Cary Salsberg	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

OT With $40B cash in the bank, MSFT finally has an operating system for individuals that isn't a POS. For the life of that company, they have been selling dog food and consumers have been paying for prime rib. Of course, any attempt to break their lawbreaking, monopolistic control of PC software would harm "innovation."

To: Gottfried who wrote (4774)	1/6/2003 12:18:02 PM
From: w0z	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25522

*OT?* (actually I think it is very much on-topic!) Gottfried wrote: But the much better OS is the main reason [I upgraded to XP on one of my PCs]. Here's why XP will drive new hardware: I looked into upgrading my 333 MHz E-machines to XP. Microsoft has a very large (50 MB program) which you can download to check compatibility for the upgrade. It checks both hardware and software compatibilities and gives you a very detailed report. It showed no major hardware incompatibilites but one software incompatibility that kept me from ordering the $89 XP upgrade from Amazon: Software That Does Not Support Windows XP Setup has found programs on your computer that are incompatible with (that is, they do not work with) Windows XP. Contact your software vendors to obtain updates or Windows XP-compatible versions. If you don't update these programs before you upgrade, the programs will not work after the upgrade is completed. ATI Scheduler (on the Start menu) Before you upgrade to Windows XP, you should remove any incompatible programs if you can. After the upgrade, uninstall for these programs might not work. Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel can help you uninstall most programs. Click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then click Add/Remove Programs. I checked ATI's site and they have a drivers for Win98 and XP, but they are incompatible! It scares the heck out of me to think about unloading the graphics drivers when I still need the display to work to accomplish the upgrade, and I doubt most people would even consider doing this themselves. I have two choices: 1. An $89 XP upgrade and God only knows what other headaches and wasted time will be involved doing the upgrade. 2. Buy a refurbished system from HP or Dell for about $350 (Celeron 1.5GHz/256MB/30GB/Xp Home) or about $500 for a brand new system (Pentium4 2.0GHz/256MB/20GB/Xp Pro). The choice seems fairly obvious to me! And I suspect many businesses and consumers are making the same conclusion.