Re: Linux on Sun-intel or Dell-intel?

On Oct 26, 3:49 pm, hpuxrac <johnbhur..._at_sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On Oct 25, 10:30 pm, joel garry <joel-ga..._at_home.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm close to buying a laptop, curious about recommendations. I was
> > going to go to Fry's to score those AMD-64's with a couple of gig for
> > $500 they were advertising, but they were evacuated. Now I see
> > recommendations of 3G minimum for Vista... I need more than one.
>
> 2 things.
>
> 1) HP has a real nice box AMD 5600 with 3 gig of RAM for 680. It's a
> desktop not a laptop.
>
> 2) Why VISTA ? Whatever you buy just re-install xp pro on top if you
> really need windows as native.

I've watched one of my customers who knows much more than I (which is not hard to do) about these things get xp and then downgrade, with the idea of going back up when everything he needs works. That is, I've watched him struggle for hours with driver problems because he was trying to do this. The difference is, he's doing it for his high muckety-mucks, and it's what he does all day and he can take the time to do whatever he needs to, and I need to do it for wife and 11-year- old, as well as myself. For myself, I can be sloppy, but the others need to be able to be helped by third parties, since I don't really want to be at a customer doing phone support for my wife, or otherwise cutting into billable hours. So there's 3 laptops I'm going to be dealing with, with different requirements. Mine is the only one that will have Oracle, and my desktop can do it, so that's going to be last (potentially some time off). I'd rather not use Vista, but that is what is coming with all these new computers. There was a time I'd have gone linux all the way, but for them it would be more trouble for me.

>
> Not that I am a fan at all of running oracle in windows but
> complaining about DLL hell when there is a chance of biting the bullet
> and doing your own os maintenance if windows is involved? Why?

Well, I am on my own desktop, (the one with the hell) and I don't like it. In fact, I'm typing this on my wife's desktop as I wait for some backup software to install, which is very odd because I know I installed Windows backup, since there's still some unwritten-to-cd images from it, and it's gone. Since several other people have worked on this machine (it had hardware problems), I don't know who to be pissed at, or if it fell to some Windows update routine or selfimmolation.   I have no patience for this sort of thing unless I'm getting paid for it, and even then I still wind up complaining on usenet.

DA Morgan said:

> But why purchase a license for something you are just going to throw
> away? Buy without a hard disk and install your own.

Cheaper than doing it myself, since it would cut into billable hours. I hate giving MS money on principle, though. In the end, it's not really getting thrown away, since I will need to use it to interface with things outside my control - customers, wife's students, school and other stuff, kids school.

jg

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