From: "Geo." 

"mike"  wrote in message
news:gshfp2t4hp4b38sd8eijl07kb02vsujfrk{at}4ax.com...

> For a while.  At some point it will become like NT, a quality OS that
> Microsoft has left behind.

For a bunch of machines on an internal network with very limited outside
access there is no left behind by Microsoft. The only people who can leave
it behind are the guys writing hardware drivers.

But yeah I get your point. Fortunately for me at this point in time Linux
is a quite viable choice for these machines, and to top it off both the OS
and apps I need for 95% of our internal desktops are completely free so it
will cost me nothing but a bit of effort to give it a go. I have 3 machines
that have to stay with windows because of autocad and pagemaker other than
that I could put in whatever I want (and I will not be moving to XP once I
can't get W2K drivers so it's either Vista or Linux at this point).

I'm in no rush though, drivers will be available for a few more years
minimum and I can get picky about finding hardware that still has drivers
after that. Heck I ran mini systems 15 years past their EOL point, and
there wasn't a whole lot of hardware support even before EOL there.. so
I've got experience at this. 

My real problem is going to be the ISP mail and web servers. Whatever I go
to there I'm going to have to be like "mr top 10 expert" at
securing them so there are other factors to consider for external machines.
I do not relish the idea of going backwards and relearning sed and vi.. In
the end that may prove to be a more motivating factor than DRM, hard to say
at this point.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5