hello! just wanted to share with you all the fun i had yesterday reinstalling winxp on my box... so, i had these .doc docs i had to print, too bad openoffice couldn't format them properly... hence i went about reinstalling winxp... clean hd, set the thing up using my old winxp cd i've had since it came out back in 2001...

gents i spent the whole day trying to figure out why my ethernet interface got flooded and the rpc kept crashing on me... finally i found out in the end: connect a winxp box to the net and you are doomed if you haven't some anti-crap software properly installed... at the very least, make sure to apply the sp2 first before plugging that net cable in...

it was a long time since i last used this abysmal piece of ehm..! fine os, i thought this hype about malware, worms etc plaguing the windows world was just an exaggeration by us linux people, but it looks like it's true after all, it took me hours to clean my pc...

and what's worse, see what we have to bear up with: we have to keep winxp on our machines to run msoffice, since a lot of people keep writing their docs using their office suite... and i'm not talking about my gramma, i'm talking about a professor from a tech uni who, well, say, "is in the bad habit of" writing notes for his classes using the ms suite...

end of my rant, just tried to print my docs. Too bad the print system doesn't work. Anybody knows a third party program to make it work? tia

Have a nice day!

Errr, that's weird, I managed to get ALL my old MS Documents to work perfectly on OpenOffice here.. WinXP might be Eye Candy. But it trashes your PC on the long run..

-A

Eye candy? Really? I find the default look of WinXP the most horrible interface ever. Who thought that blue and green combine perfectly had a horrible taste. First thing I do after a fresh install of WinXP is to enable cleartype and set the theme to classic. I'm allergic to the XP theme

And I'm with you garba. I had the very same problem with WinXP. A fresh install has to be unplugged. WinXP auto-magically downloads garbage from the net upon start up.

That's one of the things well thought on Linux: You can patch and install most of the updates _before_ booting into Linux, starting X and other things (at least some distros do that). In Windows you first boot, then you will need to patch and download things: that's too late :\

I, also, switch the XP theme to Classic Annoyingly, you should never connect your Windows box to the net until it's (at the very least) firewalled and virus guarded and, hopefully, fairly well patched. But the activation method is first encountered during the install and needs the internet!

Gaaaah!

friends, it's amazing the feeling you get when you get back to windows after having stuck with linux for a while... you simply end up wondering how they could ever come up with such a piece of crap, I don't want to sound like a linux zealot (well, I think I am in good company here ), the most disturbing thing is the lack of a decent multiuser support, not to mention that dumb start up wizard... first you are asked to provide an admin password during setup, then the "user" account you first log in with is actually an admin account... the setup procedure is a joke... lol... but the most weird thing is hardware access, I don't think there's a way to prevent users from accessing hardware, a limited user can download, for example, a program like speedfan, turn the cpu fan off and fry the whole thing... I don't know maybe I am just wrong and there's a way to prevent this... and yes, right now, 95% of the pc's in the world run this OS... and the interface, oh my, anybody mentioned consistency? Sans serif here, Tahoma there, misaligned frames... perhaps somebody should tell them about self-formatting widgets, you know, it's not easy to draw every single form, property sheet etc by hand...

sorry for my rant but you can't imagine the time I had to waste over the last two days to figure out what was amiss, and thinking I had to go through this just to print some dumb word docs just makes me sick! regards

why not just simply go to the library or ask a friend to print them out for you?
then you dont need to bother with installing windows...

And then there's CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office

yeah when I install Windows the first thing installed is Anti-Virus software and all my drivers and Necessary software I have downloaded already and keep them up to date. Also I slipstreamed SP2 into my install cd.

If your going to dual boot, setup a small fat partition so both OS's can see it and never connect Xp to the internet, just put the doc you need to print on the shared partition and read it in xp from there.
I wonder if any of the free office file viewers could be amde to work under wine? I haven't had the need to try yet though