Re: [Hampshire] You win some, you loose some.

On Friday 06 March 2009 18:56:37 Rik wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 17:29 +0000, Lisi wrote:
> > I have recently acquired a new client whose problems required a
> > reinstall, but he hadn't got any disks. I told him what I saw as the
> > options and he chose Linux. That evening he rang his son-in-law "who
> > knows about computers", and he rang me next day to say that he has
> > decided that he would rather buy XP. :-( But he had at least heard of
> > Linux.
> >
> > The same day I had a call from someone who has been using Linux happily
> > for a couple of years now. He has one or two problems that need sorting
> > out - and he wants to buy a laptop. The criteria are:
> >
> > 1) It must run Linux. That seemed to be the single most important thing!
> > :-) 2) He wants to carry it around with him to do word processing and
> > use a spreadsheet when he is away from home.
> > 3) As cheap as possible within those parameters.
> >
> > But I had to ask him to get those last two criteria. The only thing that
> > he was most insistent on as being the brief was that it should run Linux!
> > He had seen Vista and was adamant that he did _not_ want to be landed
> > with it.
> >
> > Lisi
>
> You have to smile. The old windownians bang on about 'the cost of
> ownership' with Linux and I could not agree more. I don't have to worry
> about the cost of owning Anti-Virus, Software Firewall, Office Suite,
> Database Suite, constant loss of productivity with patching and cyclic
> rebooting therein and the plethora of security issues that make people
> too scared to visit any web page.
>
> I recently purchased my first laptop for *me*. Not one for the kids, but
> one of my own. Even despite the minor hassle I had with the wireless it
> was still much easier to get it to work that the same laptop running
> Vista had been (my poor daughter).
>
> The winners are those in the know :-)

We had an Acer laptop at work which had been problem-matic, it would keep
loosing the CD drive (despite a couple of reinstalls) and the touch pad was as
sensitive as a sumo wrestler arse (regardless of and adjustments of the
settings). Add to that it was a slow dog to use (running XP). So when the
opportunity came for it to be retired the user took it.

I had the laptop sat under my desk and I needed something to test the latest (at
the time) release candidate of Mepis 8. So I tried it on the laptop, the live
CD booted and everything worked so I installed it, It was like cutting the
restraints that had been holding the laptop back. Its now flying, I have yet to
have any CD drive problem, the touch pad works perfectly.

Sometimes its not a hardware that causes the problem its the operating system
you choose.

Tim