What did you do with your Windows box?

Good Lord, Bubba!!

My "beige box" sits in the garage next to the shovels, rakes, work out equip. and other random tools I don't use too often anymore. I'm considering rebuilding it and turning it into a server and kids machine. The only problem is I let my kids use my MacBook and I know they're going to feel gipped. I want to just buy another Mac and be done with my Windows days all together. I still see them enough because I'm always asked to do tech support at the lab where I work. Its just not the same. I've only been a OSX user for almost a year and I just don't see myself every going back to windows. People always ask me can i do this or that on a Mac and my answer is always yes...and much much more. I gotta feeling I'm done entirely with owning a PC. I may still dab in the Windows OS but it'll be from the comfort of my Mac. I've still never used Vista. I know I'll have to get my feet wet eventually, sigh.

I backed up all of my email, documents, photo's and bookmarks to my 320gb external drive, downloaded the latest Mandriva Linux, burned the ISO to DVD and set it up as a "play station" where I can play with and learn Linux. I figured that was the best way to cut the umbilical to Win. Loving my new MBP and looking at a mini to replace the desktop.

jimhoff said:

In preparation for Vista, I built a nice computer. The day Vista went on sale I was at CompUSA at midnight. I think it was aboiut 3 hours later that I started becoming a Mac user, although it took me a few months to get one after blowing a ton of money trying to fix Vista. I bought: New computer, 2nd GB ram, new NAS, new scanner, etc. etc.

I turned the old Vista box on for the 1st time after a few months of Mac use. Vista doesn't work at all - I'll have to reformat again - this would be the 3rd Vista install on this box. Right now it's in use as an XP just for backward compatible stuff, but it's a waste.

I'm happy with the Mac - What do some of you use for a OS on your old Vista-ready boxes?

Ubunto? Ubunto 64-bit? What did you do?

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i tried Ubuntu (Linux) and it installed fine. the problem came with trying to find drivers for the system, such as video and sound. i admit, after a few days of searching, i got burnt out and gave up. For my use of windows machines... Xp is just fine... but i only use windows when i have to.

cmcveay said:

I backed up all of my email, documents, photo's and bookmarks to my 320gb external drive, downloaded the latest Mandriva Linux, burned the ISO to DVD and set it up as a "play station" where I can play with and learn Linux. I figured that was the best way to cut the umbilical to Win. Loving my new MBP and looking at a mini to replace the desktop.

Click to expand...

have any issues finding drivers, such as sound and video? i did with ubuntu...

Shannonb said:

May I ask what you're doing to need a mac pro with 6gb of ram and another PC with 1.2 TB of space? Seriously, I'm intrigued.

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I back-up my back-ups as well as store movies and music to the Linux box. As for the Mac Pro with 6gb, I knew I'd be running virtual machines because I like to tinker with OS's.

For me your question has an easy answer. My favorite Linux Distro: PCLinuxOS. It is found at http://www.pclinuxos.com. If you want to play a bit put the pclinuxos disk into your Mac and boot from disk. It works! I also found that my MacBook Pro burns iso images beautifully by using the disk management tool.

Actually, I still get a lot of use out of my old Windows boxes (I have a few!). Like a lot of other posters, I have turned some of them into Linux boxes. Arch Linux is my favorite, but I hear that Yoper 3.0 has just been released. Yoper 2.1 was hands down the fastest operating system I have ever used. I will investigate Yoper 3.0. All reports I have read say that it is like Yoper 2.1 - a bit rough around the edges, so don't go there if you aren't comfortable hacking around with Linux configs a bit - but equally fast: a real barn burner.

So, Linux for sure. I have also been going retro. I can't stand software bloat, and have been investigating how usable older Windows releases are these days. I have spent a fair amount of time configuring and playing with Windows 98SE (one of Redmond's best products IMHO) and lately, Windows ME. Windows ME, variously called "Mistake Edition", "Miserable Edition" and the like, and also labeled by PC World magazine as one of the top five worst technical products of all time, is actually pretty good if you do a clean install.

It is interesting because you get a relatively modern OS (remember, XP came out in 2001 and still chugs along) that requires only 32 MB of RAM and about 512 MB of disk! On an even reasonably modern computer, this system just screams along.

As you can tell, I am a speed freak - I want my machines to be fast and responsive to the touch. So, I use my old Windows boxes for stupid stuff like seeing how fast I can make them go.

I use my Mac for EVERYTHING else! I *live* on my Mac; I *tinker* with my PCs. That says it all to me. The Mac is rock solid, fast, reliable - it really does just work. The PCs take endless tinkering, but I am a techo-geek and sort of enjoy that!

My two cents.

Gave my 5 year old Windows laptop to my mom. then got a Windows desktop, two years old. and finally got a macbook. dual-booted windows XP on it for a month to do some CAD work, went back to mac, then dual-booted ubuntu, fedora, and tried openSUSE 10.2 and knoppix. now a %100 mac user.

sold my media computer to finace my 20" iMac
sold my 'family' computer and a PDA to finance my 13" Macbook

Mine is sitting right next to me as my media center, i use it to DL music, movies, etc from iTunes and it has a TV card that goes into my TV, to watch movies. I am running windows XP with a BBClean sheel modification (I think it runs just a tad bit faster...).

My kids use mine that was less than 4 months old when I bought my macbook. I get on it everyonce in a while to chek up on them and make sure there not doing anything there not supposed to be doing. Other than that my daughter uses it for internet and store her pictures on. Everything else is done on my MB.

Well, I'm the only mac user in my household. The rest of the family uses the Vista based desktop at the desk. And my dad uses his Toshiba laptop at the table for work. Im ALWAYS online somewhere other than that stupid computer desk. But ya, everyone else in my family is happy with their PCs, I dont even use them.

I have another older AMD system that I kept around. There are some things I just can't do on a Mac. Things like, take an Xbox game and make an image with it and put it on my xbox so I don't have to fiddle with disks..

Also, compressing/extracting these massive wads of data is just more simple on a Windows machine because I have very specific software to do so, which is Windwos only.