[ale] OT: Alternatives to Outlook on Winbloze

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 20:59 -0800, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> 
> I recently moved from Linux to WinXP (for other business software
>  reasons).  I use Thunderbird (Mozilla project) but NOT Norton.  Norton
>  had it's day, but I think that has passed.  I only use Spybot
>  (freeware, but accepts donations) and Spyware Blaster ($$ for
>  auto-updates) and I have good confidence that my system is safe and
>  secure.  I fooled around for a while with Microsoft's Anti-Spyware
>  Beta (formerly Giant), but I didn't like it's reliance on DCOM and
>  (presumably) future reliance on .NET.  Run Spybot resident (optional
>  setting), and show your father how to keep it updated.  Along with
>  Spyware Blaster your father should be as safe as a Linux user (of
>  course he will miss out on the great KDE vs Gnome debate)  :-) 
>  Honestly guys, I am a BIG Linux advocate, but I must say that I am
>  happy using WinXP as a day-to-day OS. <ducking>
> 
> -Jim P.
> 

Honestly, I'd have to say that WinXP is a good day-to-day thing.  I use
Windows XP at work (of course, because I must), but for some of the
stranger things that I do there, it's kind of nice.

Now, if someone would've told me ten years ago, that I'd be advocating
the use of an MS product for *anything*, I'd have told them that they
were crazy.

But, anyway.  Up until this week I was actually using it on my
development workstation.  The only real things that I miss from running
WinXP on this thing is accurate decoding of DivX (mplayer doesn't seem
to like the official DivX codecs, and Ubuntu comes with #$*& for real
multimedia support), and the ability to watch Shoutcast TV streams on
here... not to mention, the Linux driver for my TV card doesn't work.
Over time, I suspect that I'll fix all of that, but this setup is a
little more ideal for the type of development that I'm working on (a PHP
application using PostgreSQL as a back-end).

Windows XP did okay, but... well, it's network layer leaves much to be
desired.  It's way slow compared to Linux, at least from what I can see.
I can download at home using Linux at > 1 MB/sec... and the HTTP server
running responds in < 1 sec.  With WinXP its' more like 500KB/sec & 4 -
6 seconds for the Apache web server to respond, and if you add in delays
added by poor PgSQL performance on Win32, it's worse...

	- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                     fd0man at gmail.com

"Why geeks like computers: unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount,
fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep."  :-)
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