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When a user tells you a computer is acting funny it generally means they did something and don't want to tell you.   Since he was here to start work on a renovation, I set the water boarding equipment to the side and set the funny box up.  Funny, general means a virus, a virus that was acquired from the general users urge to click click click anything that shows up on their screen like its a whack a mole game except they can't click the little X they just have to go for that YES.  I groaned as I booted the machine and as I stared at the XP boot logo I thought of all the nasty little trojans that were loading that would be disappointed to find no network.   As the wallpaper loaded and the plethora of icons spread all of the place made their appearance, as predicted, the machine sat their with that damn little spinning hour glass grinding away.   An hour glass???  do people still use them?? does the younger generations even know what the hell the are... when are we going to kill these stupid metaphors.  Anywho, its time for a three finger salute to see whats going on and it does live up to the funny description.  Its not a virus holding up the show, but the damn virus protector itself.  AVG is stuck in an infernal updating loop (notorious bug) and windows defender is have a CPU war with it.  Now, I didn't just fall out of a floppy disk drive (hmmm, not sure people remember them either) so I am very suspicious about this activity as it could be a virus gumming up the way.  I kill the AVG process to see whats going on and whap, I'm hit with the nastiest of all virus loading screens, Yahoo Messenger and oh goodie a yahoo and ask search bar.  The fix, thou time consuming was easy and after many uninstalls I switched guard duty over to MS Security Essentials.  Now your saying MS??  WTF you moron?  Security Essentials has been reviewed extensively as one of the best and I personally use it on my machines.  Light, fast, and protects against viruses, malware, yada yada.  Run a little CCleaner and boom I am done right?  Wrong!

He breezes past the now fixed machine that I was surfing the web with and he begins to explain this neat little white computer he saw with this great scrolling, make icons biggie, click able thing at the bottom. (groan, Mac)  He really liked using that so "No problem, we can do that"  RocketDock, a task bar killer, a clock widget and a little theme skinning and tada, XP looks and acts almost like a Mac. (I said ALMOST, no i-fan mail needed)  He is quite happy with his now icon free, clean and fast system and took it home.  (I even duplicated the apple/start button using KKMenu) I had tried many of these task bar replacements in the early days of XP but they tended to slow the system and hog the limited resources.  Fast forward 9 years and the surviving dock programs are very well written (lots and lots of revisions) and have a plethora of add ons to customize the dock the way you see fit. (not to mention, even the lowliest system far exceed the suggested requirements for XP)




This of course made my head echo with questions I have been asked recently.  When are you going to move to 7, everyone says 7 is stable and great you should get it.  My rebuttal was and remains why?  It's new and shiny?  has a cool look?  has nifty new features?  What's wrong with my 9 year old, highly vetted, super patched XP?  Yea yea, MS says they will stop supporting it in June trying to force people to upgrade but we all know thats a bluff.  They can't abandon a large population of users.  Change over will likely be forced only when peripheral manufactures stop writing drivers for XP (bahahaha, never walk away from profit)  So back to whats wrong with XP?  The system I am writing this on is a 5 year old dual core laptop with docking station that supports dual monitors.  Bleeding edge when purchased, now a low end machine.  The funny thing is its been running for five years never having crashed and still the original install.  I only reboot the system when forced to by an upgrade/patch or when on a long trip.  XP has worked flawlessly for me from everyday pedestrian uses to hard core web development.  Periphals have come and gone, extended the wireless with a pcmcia card (hmmm, do laptops still have those?), talks with/coverts with a Nook yada yada yada.  So really whats wrong with XP?  After mac-ifing my father-in-laws computer I did some of it to my computer and tried to see how many cool Win 7 stuff I could jigger into XP... and MS themselves are a big help.  Of course you should do all the updates, which gives you IE8, the most recent media player, silver light yada yada.  Since I use Chrome and a variety of media players this matters not for me but eh.  The desktop search on Win 7 is oh so much better but thats easily added to XP.  A quick download from the MS site and I have the New MS Desktop Search 4.0. Yes yes, Google desktop, but I wanted to go for Win 7 and honestly, I can't believe I'm saying this, Search 4.0 is better.  Aero skins.. no problem with UxTheme patcher. New Task Switcher, stickies and a free pandora app and a few other apps and it looks good.  In the end its not quite Win 7, but pretty darn spiffy for a 9 year old OS that you can easily find for free.  Funny isn't it?

Hey Hey, just get Linux right?  Sorry Linux fans, but XP has tons of free software, every driver you need, large user base yada yada.. and with modern hardware, XP zings along.  If I have ancient hardware I go for the tiny tiny Puppy Linux the fits onto aand can boot from 512MB USB key.