And look at this. If you want an 11′ wintel netbook, Intel demands you use a culv chip, and Microsoft requires Home Premium. By my calculation that would be about $140 more than an 11′ ARM machine. I bet that would drive a lot of consumers to ARM.

In 1998, Blue Mountain greeting cards from Colorado and Microsoft were coming out with Internet greeting cards. Around that Nov., MS put out a huge advertising blitz, you MUST upgrade Internet Explorer (which is why I have never used it ever since).

Blue Mountain sued and won there case – it was deliberately done that MS put hooks in IE and deleted and/or not delivered over a million and a half greeting cards to the public.

Click on my webpage to find out more;

http://www.hechlerpianoandorgan.com/other/microsoft.html

I always looked around, had a Mac once (the horrible OS9 was worse than garbage) and tried Linux back in the RedHat6.1 days and not until VIsta the first came out did I seriously think about Linux again.
A 300$ netbook was my first glance at the modern Linux desktops. I realized early that I hated the ugly Ubuntu desktop called GNOME which is a copy of Mac, hated the fonts and the whole feel and look and discoverered there is a KDE desktop with Kubuntu and Mandriva and the XCFE desktop which could run my 10 yr old Thinkpad (with 8 mb video card!. Woohoo!) and P3 desktop in the youngest;s room.

Once we got confortable with the netbook, we moved on to dual booting both XP and Linux and now all our 6 computers in the house run Linux. (We keep XP around on one still for a few games that we dont have on the Wii or PS3). Right now im in the middle of learning Virtuabox and will soon have XP running virtually on that computer.

My point is, I will never again pay for Office or for Windows OS.
That’s it.
You saw the last dollar from me.
There is simply no need.

I upgrade my own desktops so I dont pay the MS tax that people are forced to pay whether they want to or not. And I just bought my mom her first laptop, a 2nd hand one which cost me less than 200$ because it works only w./ power supply and trackpad is busted (mom prefers the big mouse anyways) and which is running Mandriva Linux w.KDE4.3.
This is her first computer ever.
She knows how to access Gmail (firefox extension), how to use Skype and Kopete for IM and even saved a text file in Open Office this week (her first save and retrieve operation ever). She loves the games and prefers the speed dial extensions to view sites than using bookmarks.
Most importantly, KDE lets me adjust everything how she wants which is very, very big fonts on everything. Flow, design and line isnt her thing… she wants to see things…. BIG.

So now, were all using Linux, my folks are both on Linux on their computers, i dont have to play the tedious virus/malware game and loading and updating and blah,blah….

They wont be able to give away its OS like it did with XP but even if it did:
We dont NEED Microsoft anymore.
It doesnt mean it will go away but there are now both Linux and Mac which have comparable desktops and its all a question of taste now rather than functionality (I use OS10 at work sometimes and have tried Vista 7 RC).

If I buy another laptop next year, I will no doubt by a Dell or other that carries a Linux option. I wont even care which one (since I can change it) as long as I dont pay for the OS. Why should I ?

I have a safe OS with multiple looks for different needs, it gets updated every 6 months, as does the KDE desktop and every day, the latest bug fixes and additions are added to my computer.
And its free.
With kids, house, cars, recession… EVERY dollar counts.
Why should I spend when I dont have too?
It would be like paying for bottled Dasani when you can get the same thing from the tap for free (minus the beautiful bottle. Design is important to some people you know.)

Terry