I've never seen a set of servers running anything other than LINUX since the late '90's for an ISP, so I'm probably too limited in experience, but, since people abandoned Windows NT v4, all the ISP folks with whom I've talked all have moved to LINUX precisely because there were fewer attackers willing to go to the trouble of writing their malware for LINUX, which has a much smaller installed base than Windows.

I've never become expert in FREEBSD, *NIX or LINUX or, for that matter any other competing OS. Im not a Windows expert either. I am, by some, considered to be somewhat knowledgable about computers, in a more general sense, having been a user/professional since the very early '60's, and I do know, from observation, that when a product manufacturer stops publishing a useable user manual for his product, his market will die off. That's what's happening to M$ and it's clear that they've seen that it's happening as well, hence, they've moved their main thrust into a different product area. Now, there are enough fools in the world to keep them fat for a couple of releases yet, but, with the pace of progress in the LINUX world, well, get the UBUNTU and FEDORA DVD's, and see for yourself.

I know very little about LINUX, but found that installing FEDORA was considerably simpler and less troublesome than installing Windows on the same hardware. (I use removable tray-based HDD's, so it's no trouble). The only thing I had to do to install FEDORA was to enter a very little information about my computer, e.g. time zone, DHCP server address, user name, passwords, etc. That's less than I had to tell Windows XP. FEDORA asked me nothing further and yet it automatically updates itself each time it's booted, so it will remain current, and it's pretty easy to operate. It comes with MSOffice-substitute software that works very well, and works with the MOZILLA browser and FireFox/Thunderbird internet tools. It has what's probably the best and best-supported development software suite that there is, and, naturally, the price is right.

Not only that, most of the DOS app's that won't run under VISTA run just fine under DOSEMU and at least one WINDOWS emulator seems to run those old Windows app's that have become troublesome. Now, notebooks have probably got to wait a bit longer for the fully automatic installation software to catch up, it's a pretty safe bet that your OLD notebook will find proper support and therefore automatically install its hardware under LINUX.

RE