First (?) call for Micro$oft to abandon Vista.

[coldfish]

M$ abandon Vista? You guys are on crack!  I think you've been using AmigaOS so long, you forget the sheer brute force of a virtual monopoly - which M$ has.

Last I looked, Apple have a <7% share of the OS market, which is just short of inconsequential.  Vista already tops that with 7.91%.  Linux doesnt even make it into whole numbers.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2

Where are the gamers going to go? Mac? Linux? Great, if you like 2D flash style games...

Consoles?  Courtesy of Sony and their botched PS3 launch, M$ have tripled their share in that market in the last 18 months, almost by accident.

Vista, Xbox and M$ are here to stay, get over it.

[coldfish]

This thread is heavy on the wishful thinking and light on rational thinking.

I see a trend forming...

[coldfish]

Ubuntu's great for the average user, email, browsing, accounts ect.  Cant be beaten for value!

I had it dual boot with XP on my laptop for a while, but eventually the novelty wore off and I was booting it maybe once a month, just because.
Also, Ubuntu did take about twice as long to boot compared to XP and had very buggy hibernate/standby features.  It's media playing features are a little lacklustre too, DVD playback was choppy at best compared to <20% CPU usage under XP.

The final nail in the... partition, was when Ubuntu broke for some reason, and would lock half way through boot.  I couldnt be bothered trying to fix it.

Ubuntu's great when it works and/or you have time & energy to problem solve.

[coldfish]

Why isn't the computer ready to go when I power it up, why don't we have zero boot times, why don't programs start instantaneously when I double click on their icon.

Welcome to the physical limitations of hard-disk technology.  

[coldfish]

yep ok hard disks take time to spin up, but the data transfer rates and data densities are 100 times more than they were in the days when a 20 meg hd for an A500 was huge yet, booting up takes ten times as long.  why does 1000 times more data need to be loaded at boot to make a gui appear and get the mouse, and kb to work?

This next bit will rouse some controversy...

-My XP PC boots faster than my A1200 did, it's true.
-From standby/hibernate its even faster, <20 seconds.
-The PC can do, and does do so much more than the Amiga, start filling the latter up with modern-day apps/requrements like a USB, IP stacks, mediator, RTG drivers etc, and watch what happens...
-HD speed is an even bigger bottleneck today than it was 15 years ago, thats why things are a changing.

Some perspective;

I remember when my C64 took 5+ minutes to load a game, now I get FarCry up and running in less time from a cold boot.  I for one would say thats actually not too bad.