Getting worse for MS
This week I had a coworker, computer literate but not geeky, complaining to me that he was about to return his brand new Sony Vaio. The machine came with Vista but did not run half of its software and he was bored of the overall use interface clumsiness. On top of that, the machine (a dual core laptop with 2GB of RAM) fell very very slow.
What he really wanted was to put XP on the system, as he had a purchased XP license. He tried, but he could not install it because there were no XP drivers for his brand new machine. He complained to Sony and got a response from their customer service that said that there will not be XP drivers for the machine.
That was the point where he wanted to just return the machine to Sony when I suggested him another approach. He had heard of Linux, but there were two things that made him not jumping into it. First, since the HW was so new as not to have XP drivers, he was fearing that no Linux drivers were going to exists. Second, he had a handful of programs that do not have Linux equivalent that he still wanted to run. I asked if he had games or anything DirectX related, and he was not interested it that.
My suggestion was to try Kubuntu, since he was going to return the machine there was nothing to lose anyway. He tried it, installation was smooth and all basic HW was recognized and working.
I then helped him in two areas. First, the webcam required compiling a module and installing it. Second, I set up VirtualBox for him. Now his XP license lives comfortably inside a VirtualBox VM and he has installed all the programs he needs for which he does not have direct Linux equivalents.
He's the happiest man on earth. The machine performs splendidly, he can browse the net, mail, etc on the Linux side of things and can use the Windows programs when he needs them. Plus, no Windows AV, Windows firewall, etc. He has just made an snapshot of the VM after finishing installation and if XP kills itsefl he can just restore the image, which is a regular file inside his home Linux folder.
Voila, another convert... and by the way it's an awesome machine. Now try to do that with Vista....