What I hate most about it is just all the pre-installed software. You can't turn of MSN Messenger (well, you can but it's either a registry hack or mucking about in your sys files - and it's been shown that ****ing service packs reinstall it anyway) which is a BIG security hole, or "feature" as M$ call it. I've not used Mesenger for ooh aout five months... but I chat on it every night.
Such is the power of Trillian.
There's plenty more useless folderol as well, which you can't choose not to install. What I thought was great about computers was that you had a oad of options - not to with half of XP. "We know what you want better than you do" say M$. It was the beginnnings of the implementation of this in Win2K that finally made me switch to Linux. My estimate is that in a years time at the very most the only thing I will use my windows partition for is playing games. I've already found Linux apps to replace virtually anything I can find for Windows (in fact, most of the stuff I was looking for was built into Linux anyway).
Product activation sucks. My hardware configuration changes quite frequently, and I really can't be doing with having phone M$ up once a month or so begging them to let me use my computer again.
Mwah ha ha ha haah! You and your talk of stability. I can go into the GNOME system monitor and kill all my important processes, rendering my operating system useless. Then I can restart them and it all works again. AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Try killing explorer.exe in the task manager and restarting it, and see how far that gets you.
Like I said above, I've tried crashing Linux on purpose. Sure, I managed to crash a few programs. But not once have I managed to crash the OS. Not once have I had to reboot "cos it was acting a bit funny". Simply put, Linux is virtually impregnable. Mwah ha hah.
Oh yeah, and I can't think of any other OS's that'll give you a complete server (of any kind) OS for less than the price of the new Britney Spears album. Not that you need to pay for it either.
Ah. Unix rocks, and Linux is an utter mind ****ing delight after the dark days of Miscrosoft. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
I have a system with 384 MB of RAM. At boot, I get about 220 MB free. Then I had a quick fiddle with my system configuration, and found out that Win2K was loading a load of useless dll's (and all sorts of other stuff) into memory for seemingly no reason at all. A few quick tweaks later and I get 290 MB free at boot. XP does similar things. Why? Cos it's not in M$'s interests to actually make an OS that isn't a beta version.
My advice for 95/98/ME users... get 2000, not XP. Then you get to do without product activation, a load of useless programs and a slightly less opaque OS, IME with exactly the same stability. Which sucks compared to Linux of course. You won't get the shiny gooey and crap like that (unless you use a skinner or similar), but then you're not using your computer just to look shiny and yummy, right?
Oh **** you are. Damn.
Oh well, I shall just have to resort to running DVD movies as my desktop wallpaper in Linux then