I run 4 machines in my house, and am about to run 5. One for Myself, my wife, my kids, a file server and a test machine. I need at least 1 copy of Office Pro/Premium and one copy of a basic edition of office. What this means is that if I ran MS operating systems across the board I would have to spend (based on newegg.com prices which tend to be low end and they are a great company to buy from online) ;
5 copies of Microsoft Windows XP Professional With Service Pack 2 – OEM @145.95 = USD$729.75
1 Copy of Microsoft Office XP Professional with SP3 and MS Publisher – OEM USD$299.95 (The 2003 copy runs 75 bucks more)
1 Copy of Microsoft Office Basic Edition 2003 With SP1 – OEM USD$169.95
$1199.65 without shipping before I even turn the first computer on! Wow! and I can do the same thing with any one of 10 linux distributions for free!
I must admit that due to copies of OS that came with systems, upgrades etc I have not had to spend that all at once, but if I follow my upgrade trails on all my OS and Office purchases since the late 90's it runs over USD$2900.
Okay so MS pretends to not be the evil empire, they prop up Apple so that the monopoly laws do not smack them so hard, and they even release a free Beta antivirus and spyware remover recently. Well, it seems that spyware is only spyware if you do not partner on some level with Microsoft. As it is pointed out at Sunbelt Software Blog adding insult to injury, Microsoft now chooses to have their antivirus/spyware app default to IGNORE Gator, one of the very worst applications you can have on your computer. ANYTHING from Claria Software, aka Gator Spyware/Adware/Malware home of poorly coded apps that are so bad for your computer I could make a tolerable living JUST fixing machines that have it installed should be set to autoremove.
A quote from the linked article,
“A post on BroadBand reports by Eric Howes is reporting that a number of Claria programs are set to a default action of “Ignore” in Microsoft Antispyware.
What this means is that while Microsoft Antispyware will still find Claria adware, in most cases, it will have a recommended action of “Ignore” (versus “Quarantine” or “Remove”). I'm not talking cookies, I'm talking the actual adware programs.
As many know, we get antispyware database updates from Microsoft as part of a prior arrangement. So we did a brief check of our database updates from Microsoft, and found the change to “Ignore” occurred on March 31. (We continue to list Claria in our own database with a default action of “Quarantine”).
Note that Hotbar is in their database but is set to “Quarantine”.
At any rate, does this mean that Claria will, in fact, be purchased by Microsoft? Not necessarily. It could mean, however, that the two companies are working together in some other capacity, or that Claria has successfully lobbied Microsoft to change the default action. Or, it's a simple oversight.”
I hate to do it, because I prefer to have matching OS's across the board but I have been converting my home systems to run Fedora Core 4 as a primary or dual boot, and if I could get it to work more smoothly ( it tends to firewall fire sharing on your local network and you have to manually fix it) and if I could write to NTFS without spending money I would be using it on 3 of 5 as the only OS. Especially in light of the fact that MS is going to be forced to make all Word/Excel/Powerpoint etc documents open standards, and to be honest OpenOffice works much more smoothly. One thing I am really looking forward to is the first altered OSX ( and yes I say it o-s-x) just to make mac fans angry) that can run cleanly on a PC.