This thread is basically inspired by the OS throwing between me and a few others in the 'Things TRON: Legacy Characters will NEVER Say' thread - where we tried to see who could cause the most damage with as many Windows operating systems as possible.

This actually got me thinking about other operating systems I have used over time and others I have heard.

believe it or not, there is more to computers than Windows, Linux and Mac OSX - those one can easily over look them due to low market penetration.

So to start, here's a few I like.

For games - obvious, I use Windows. But I prefer Windows 7, it the first operating system Microsoft got right since Windows XP. For me, it was OK, but for most others it was like a train wreak in slow motion.

It's surprisingly less resource hungry than its predecessor, has helpful functions that are not in your face all the time and the invigorated Task Bar really makes work easier.

For something light weight, I prefer Linux if all the apps are there. My favorite distribution is Ubuntu - the distribution that finally brought me back to Linux after being chased out by Fedora.

To me, Ubuntu really stands out as it actually tried to help out, even with the command prompt. In recent times, they have also really improved the installation of software and updates - I still have nightmares till this day about the time when package dependency management fell on the user.

More recently, two community driven operating systems have caught my eye. For the first, a little background is in order.

Anyone who owns (or owned) an Amiga computer will recall the Workbench on it. Possible one of the first operating systems where multitasking was present long before IBM PCs and even Macs.

it's still around though as Amiga OS 4, but it meant for specific hardware systems.

However, there is an open source version based on Amiga OS 3.1 called AROS - effectively a clone built from the ground up that is meant to be source compatible.

What I like about it? It is even lighter weight than Linux, only takes less than 20 megabytes of main memory or so and is blindingly fast.

The only catch though is apps maybe hard to find and it does not have what is called memory protection. For those who do not follow operating system architectures, memory protection is the mechanism where the memory used by one program is protected from access by other programs.

As memory protection is not present in AROS, it is possible for a program to accidentally kill the whole system. Granted the system can be rebooted within seconds, but it is no consolidation if work is lost.

Finally there is Haiku - a clone of BeOS and in the same vein as OS/2. Like AROS, it is very fast and is more of an interest to programmers being an object oriented operating system - most other operating systems are a combination of assembly and plain C.

So what's everyone elses favorite? If this post is anything to go by, I tend to favor a few instead of just one.where to buy abortion pill abortion types buy abortion pill online

I still love using Windows OS. At the moment, I'm stuck with Windows Vista Premium but after all the latest patches, this OS isn't as bad as it used to be, although I am running a fast machine so it could be I'm not really noticing too much system resource hogging.
I will be making the leap towards Windows 7 soon. I heard of all Windows OS, this is the best one to date.

I haven't really had many virus issues. I tend to reformat my main boot up drive at least once a year. Especially when installing new video cards and their drivers.
I tried Mac but it wasn't for me. I love Windows. I do want to grab a Mac system purely for photoshop work though since I work in the comic book/trading cards field.
So far Windows has been getting me by fairly well though.
I watch movies, play games, do my work and surf the net successfully on this OS.

Maybe one day I will try Linux. I'm just not much of a programmer.

Based on the comments in this thread, I get the felling there are some here that wish to try new operating systems - not without having to reformat the entire system.

There is a way around this. For some time now, you can get software like VMware Player or Oracle VirtualBox. Both allow for the creation of a virtual machine where one can try out another operating system without having to reformat or repartition their existing systems.

In general, it allows one to effectively create a virtual computer within their acutal computer and treat it like a physical system.

That way, one can install an operating system easily try it out. If there are any problems, just delete the virtual machine file. As the virtual machine is basically its own container, it has practically no effect on the system it is hosted on.

The only gotcha is that virtual machines do not run as fast as their physical versions. They also do not have the full access to some hardware such as video cards so it is currently ineffective to try and run games in them.

The only exception is VMware Fusion and Parallels on Mac. At this point, I do not know of any others.

I do not mean to be rude, but I think you are confusing two types of software here.

DOSbox - as its name implies - emulates a required DOS environment. I personally would not call it a virtual machine, I tend to think of it more of an emulator.

But there is no denying it's uses - I can find no better option for playing ye old DOS games. In fact, there is a Web site out there called Good Old Game (www.gog.com) which offer old games cheaply and have been able to do so thanks to the likes of DOS box.abortion pills online abortion questions cytotec abortion

Boba Fettuccini Wrote:Ideally, Windows XP. I love that OS so much, but it's getting to the point where I can't use it to do things I need to do now. I'm not a fan of either Vista (which I'm running now) or 7. Blarg.

If you do not like either of them, why not switch to 7 anyway? It's far better than Vista and isn't as much of a resource hog.

To prove that, here's a a step by step incident that happened to me when Windows 7 was still in beta.

1. Get 32-bit copy of Windows 7.

2. Create a Virtual Box VM and place the virtual hard drive on an external USB 2 hard drive.

3. Install Windows 7.

4. Play with Windows 7 for around half an hour

5. Realise that the virtual machine is performing faster than the native install of Windows Vista under it.

I am not making this up, when I found that out, I went and got the 64 bit version and used that until the final was released.

Flynn... er... Encom OS 12. It's free. where to buy abortion pill ordering abortion pills to be shipped to house buy abortion pill online

I have more than one. In order of importance (to me):
1)XP
2)OS X
3)Windows Vista
4)Windows 7

I run both OS X 10.6.7 and Win 7 64bit
Dual boot on all Mac machines.
I wont lie i only use windows for testing cross-os codecs. I do alot of 4K encoding for feature films and commercials. More often than not need to troubleshoot cross compatibility.

Linux is lovely but gets very basic at my level and just does not feel as refined.

I'd like to try ubuntu but... i really dont know what i would do on it, or where i would begin learning.

Kat Wrote: CorrupTron Wrote:Flynn... er... Encom OS 12. It's free. Ooh, yeah, me too! I got it off the internet!

Aww! That's awesome. It's a good OS, but sometimes it just seems like they slapped a 12 on the box,