This is also a good one from the Two Ronnies:

Decoding Egyptian Heiroglyphics

Welcome to our newest Team mates Tireg and gretchch

Welcome Tireg and gretchch!

I just bought a new "gaming" laptop - Asus G50Vt-X1 from Best Buy. It has Vista Home Premium 64 on it, P8400 dual-core processor, GeForce 9800M GT graphics card and 4GB of RAM. This thing flies! I can have Guild Wars running on it, along with Boinc, xfire, a few browser windows open, and bunch of stuff in the background and there is no hesitancy. It goes through 3 to 7 WUs a day, which is better than any of my other machines. Eventually I'm building a Core i7 Quad, but until then this is my best cruncher. I was a bit hesitant about Vista, but so far Vista 64 has great reviews and I have to say I'm totally happy with it.

I've run various versions of Linux on different machines and I find it to be very incapable. I'd switch to a Mac before going to Linux full time.

By the way, I loaded Windows 7 on one of my older machines (AMD AthlonXP 2000 w/1GB of RAM) and it runs very well. I did get a blue-screen after loading a trial of Norton 360 on it, but runs well otherwise. It's basically Vista rewritten.

Hi Mike & congrats on the new computer, although I think you are selling Linux short.

My youngest son runs openSuSE 11 all the time, largely because I got tired of re-installing windows because of his ability to corrupt the installation (even as a non-admin). He has only managed to corrupt Linux once, and that was several versions ago.

My wife's laptop dual boots, and when I finally get a new machine - after my oldest son's wedding, I plan to boot in Linux & run Windows in a VM for the few windows only programs (games & tax software) I still use.

Linux has made major improvements to their GUI environments in the last few years, although there are a few frustrating pieces that aren't natively available, such as ShockWave and some media player content. Even MS silverlight is now available via the open source moonlight project. Some of the missing pieces are available when running in wine, but that emulator is still a bit of a resource hog and doesn't work as smoothly as I would prefer.

Of course, one of the main reasons I like Linux, especially for my file servers, is it's ability to run problem free for long periods of time. We recently shut down one of our Linux servers at the office in order to install a new piece of hardware, and were told during the boot sequence that the hard drives were going to be scanned because the machine had not been rebooted for 416 days. How many Windows machines do you know that could go that long between reboots?

James

Mike great to hear about your laptop being able to run so many things at once. I have had to suspend my crunching to play some games, and also to run games + crunch + iTunes/web radio or else it freezes and reboots immediately. But I think it is because I need like 2G+ RAM more. I read recently that Phenom's run better with at least 4G's so I will look into getting more. I think Steam is also causing some of my problems, BUT I am quite positive it is just a needing more RAM thing. And since I have been suspending my crunching a bit more lately, my stats have nosedived LoL

I have been crunching CEP exclusively with checked box to send other work when needed (which it does) and I know the work itself isn't causing any problems. For the most part my WU's are great. Have a few that are inconclusive/invalid but based on the other WU's with those..it is across the board for those not specific to my machine.

So I will get more RAM as soon as I can and hopefully a flat screen monitor as well :)