"There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers."
- Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal
Every year, a handful of students ask for advice about what they should buy ...(back to the article)
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Just to clarify, by " position of profound respect" I meant profound respect for Professor Kernighan. On reading my posted comment, I belatedly realised that my phrase could me interpreted rather differently.
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Dear Professor Kernighan, I am sitting here, writing a script in awk to solve a text processing problem for my son. I use your awk, "your" troff and occassionally play with Plan 9 ( that you were sort of involved with ). I mention this merely to indicate that I write from a position of profound respect. Now let me be blunt... why on earth are you wasting your time using Windows ? May I respectfully suggest that you use a decent operating system ? Unix, that you helped develop, is entirely suitable. Modern unices are desktop friendly. I have used various shades of linux for years to do my home computing. I understand that Ubuntu is suitable for newbies. Alternatively, Minix or Plan 9 might be worth looking at.
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Who wants boring XP grey? Sucks! Been there done that. Move on! I'm playing Crysis 64 bit on Vista 64 bit DX10 and lovin' it!
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Great article! I recently had to make the same decision. I chose XP as well. BTW, there's an easy solution to the problem of the more powerful machines not having XP. Just buy a Vista machine and load your old XP on it. As long as you kill the old XP machine, you can use the XP license on a new machine. You'll want to wipe the hard drive and reload the OS and everything else anyway since most machines come with too much crapware preinstalled.
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Hey, Prof. Kernighan, Thanks for writing this... I've been debating about whether to go for a PC or mac for my next laptop, and I know nothing about computers but what I absolutely need to know. I've used PCs forever but I hate vista. Anyway, thanks for the healthy dose of cynicism... I guess I just won't get my hopes up for either to work out perfectly.
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