[CoLoCo] Death of a Desktop

[Michael "TheZorch" Haney]

Dave Vanderploeg wrote:
> Last Saturday I went to plug an iPod into my desktop so I could add 
> some Christmas songs. There was a bit of a static pop and then the 
> system shutdown, unfortunately it never came back up. After some 
> testing I determined that the motherboard had died. It was an oldish 
> system, but still decent. It had 64bit processor, the MOBO was a 
> socket 754, which are apparently a little hard to come by now. Money 
> is a little too tight in December to rush out and pick up a new PC, so 
> I decided to get out an older system. My old system has an Athlon 
> 2200, with a gig of ram and 128mb PCI (not PCI-Express) video card. So 
> I installed Ubuntu, enabled the Nvidia driver and now I've got it 
> running fairly fast WITH Compiz.
>
> Imagine doing that with Vista, downgrading to system thats years old. 
> Not only were there no license problems, but I have the advanced 
> graphics that you need a cutting edge PC to use with Vista. Its not 
> fast enough for most games, but at least I have access to all of my 
> files until I can buy a new PC.
>
> Dave 
I've got an Athlon XP 2200+ system with a 1GB of RAM and an nVidia 
Geforce FX 5600 8x AGP video card and it runs Ubuntu with Compiz Fusion 
flawlessly.  The main performance drain on Vista isn't so much its 3D 
desktop but the multiple layers of Content Protection services running 
on the system. These services are always active constantly monitoring 
the system to make sure you don't copy a DRMed music file or DRM\ed 
video file or a piece of DRMed software.  Basically they're punishing 
everyone for the actions of a small minority (piracy is not as rampant 
as the industry says it is according so several independent studies).

Anyway, downgrading to an older system like that with Vista would be 
impossible due to the fact that the Microsoft "recommended" system 
requirements on the box and the "actual known to work without issues" 
system requirements of the operating system don't match up.  As a result 
the sales of Vista are sluggish and more people are flocking to either 
Apple or Linux.  That's what they get for pandering to Hollywood rather 
than sticking up for the rights of consumers.

A lawsuit against Microsoft accusing the company of false advertising 
concerning Vista is up for review before a judge to be turned into a 
Class Action suit.  If that happens I hope it will finally be an eye 
opening experience for Steve Balmer and all the rest of them at 
Microsoft that they are not serving their customers in the way their 
customers demand.  Whatever the hell happened to "the customer is always 
right"?

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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