What's your primary Operating System?

[freebird73717]

Okay what is your primary OS? I dual boot windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. Anymore I primarily use Ubuntu.

For those of you that multi boot like I do I'm more interested in the os you use the most.

[gadgetguy]

Win2k on my primary tower PC. XP on my laptop. NT on the one I use for remote administration of customer PBXs. Win2k on my analog capture PC. Win3.1 for direct admin of my own PBX. Win98 on my wife's PC. I have more, but no other os. I still prefer Win2K over all the others, but I end up using XP just as much because my laptop is the fastest machine I have.

[redwudz]

I'm running Vista Premium on three computers, and XP on four others. But I prefer Vista.

[GMaq]

Hello,

I have two machines running Ubuntu 7.10 as the primary OS, The desktop is a dual boot with an XP Pro install that has been pared down with "XP lite" to get rid of a lot of the duplicate programs/tasks that Ubuntu handles. My laptop is running Ubuntu 7.10 with a Virtualbox VM running XP (also modded with XP lite). With folder/file sharing and full USB support XP in a VM is incredible easy and effective.

In both cases Ubuntu is used for 90% of tasks, but XP is required for Capture Card, Decrypting the latest DVD's and heavy duty Video Restoration with filters that haven't been ported to Linux yet. I truly like and appreciate the strengths of both OS's ... Ubuntu Linux has been very fun to learn and truly has become a viable alternative for most needs. Keeping email and web work on the Linux side is great for Viruses etc.

Just for kicks I have Vistamizer installed on my XP installs so I get that "Progressive" Vista feeling, but all my software still works!

[RabidDog]

I use W-Hat

[Seeker47]

I really have no practical alternative (at the moment) to the use of some Win OS for running the audio or video apps covered by VideoHelp. But, truth be told, my favorite to this day remains eComstation -- the successor to OS/2. It is immune to malware (nearly all of which targets specific things in Win), so forget about antivirus / antispyware programs, and just relax: You can surf anywhere with no worries. Inspect any mail attachment or download with impunity. No need for regular OS security patches either ! It runs contemporary 32-bit apps like FireFox or Open Office suite (regularly updated versions specifically for this platform), as well as legacy 16-bit Win apps or even old DOS utilities. The OS license costs something but most of the apps are free at this point, including many ports from the Linux world. There are obstacles to navigate in initial install and setup, but once properly setup it is rock solid stable and pretty much trouble-free. The modular, object-oriented design is far superior to the ghastly nightmare of the Win Registry. The driver apparatus is nearly all accessible and manipulable from a Plain English CONFIG.SYS file. You can transplant it to very different hardware without losing anything, and have it still work fine -- though a number of items in said CS file will likely need to be altered or tweaked, and tested: nothing to re-register or re-authorize, because you had to replace a defective piece of hardware or two. (Contrast that with the Winblows Hell I'm going through now, because I had to replace a problem MB with what is supposed to be the same rev. of the same MB !)

eCS requires only a fraction of the resources -- like memory and drive space -- that Win does. A 2G boot partition is lavish digs for eCS, not easily outgrown, whereas a Win boot partition grows like a fungus, so you'd best make it huge at the beginning. eCS boots up and shuts down much faster than W2K; XP closed the gap on the former, but not the latter. The CD app I use in eCS is naturally oblivious to DRM or copy issues, and I think the DVD one I could be using may also be. This is great for making safety backups of your Win OS and app.s discs -- no AutoRun either, so no need to hold down the Shift key when you load it.

As long as your computing experience extends back to -- say -- Win-98, the UI, though a bit different, is (IMO) much easier to pick up than any Linux I've looked at so far. I could go on.

Drawbacks ? -- of course. It's kind of an antique, and getting older . . . but then, so are many of us ! Drivers for some more recent hardware are becoming a problem. Like OS/2, eCS was designed for serious business use: all steak, no sizzle. Multimedia stuff -- despite some nice ports like DVDAuthor -- is clearly a weak area. By this point, their last version of the Flash plugin is almost useless. You can pretty much forget about your MM faves: Shrink, ImgBurn, Fab Decrypter, VLC, DVDFlick, ConvertX2DVD, etc. etc. And, from what I've heard, it seems unlikely that most of these could work from inside a VirtualBox, even though we have a couple good options of that kind. For example, I really miss Orbit Downloader when I'm running FF for eCS. I get by with a combo of Flashgot and UnPlug (almost all your FF extensions are available to use on this platform), but this is clearly a lesser substitute.

Well, you can't have everything -- at least not in one package. So, I guess I'll continue to run more than one OS.

[samijubal]

XP Home on both my PCs. They are too old for Vista.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Vista 64 on my main machine.

XP SP2 on my laptop (no choice) but I use Remote Desktop to use my Vista box when at home (it is located in a different building).

[freebird73717]

Well so far this has been an interesting thread. Especially Seeker47's response. Let's here some more. Keep it coming people!

[lordsmurf]

XP Pro or XP MCE.

[yoda313]

Vista Premium 32bit is on my newer hp machine running a dual core amd.

I have xp on my emachine that I use mainly for email and stuff. The high end video stuff like capping and converting is saved for my dual core.

[John]

Vista 64 bit, a year and a half, its the best IMHO
now running, amd phenom 9950, over clocked to 3000 mhz, and its pretty stable.

[ntscuser]

Two copies of XP Home on different drives in the same PC. One copy lies dormant unless the other fails to boot at startup.

[lordsmurf]

Server 2003 IIS6 and Server 2008 IIS7 -- forgot about those. On the servers I use daily, of course.