This fellow describes how he got a refund for Windows Vista - a whopping $200 - with the purchase of his new computer.  All he had to do was decline the Windows Vista EULA agreement when starting his computer for the first time.

Brilliant!  Now a person can go out and buy those low-end Acers you can find for $500, get $200 back and brag to all your friends that you have a fully loaded laptop for the price they paid for their ASUS EeePC or other sub-notebook!

I have serious concerns about all this news on how Windows update service had no downtime compared to Apple update service and Ubuntu update service.  My concern is that it is being hyped up as a massive Ubuntu failure. 

If one pays attention to the details, the monitoring timeframe of each service was for April 1 to June 30, 2008.  That's 3 months!  

Are 3 months supposed to be some kind of indicator that Ubuntu or Apple fail miserably compared to Windows?

• Why not measure for 4 months?  Maybe the Windows server had a HUGE failure for days before April 1?  And maybe on July 1 it went down again for days? 
  
• I don't know about you, but I'd prefer a service that went down once for a full day in a given year over a service that crashed multiple times, each time for an hour, throughout the year.  To me that suggests the people behind the first service are more knowledgeable.  When a service shows it continually has problems and can't be fixed, I begin to worry about their technical expertise.
  
• What was the server load for that time period?  How many download requests did each have?  Does the time period correspond to some recently released security or bug fixes? 
  
• Monitoring occurs by checking the URL's: archive.ubuntu.com, www.update.windows.com and swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog.  Are we sure there were no DNS issues during the 3 months? 
  

These servers operate 24/7, 358 days of the year.  I demand Pingdom AB group compare their data for 6 months, 1 year, 2 years and 5 years if the data is available.

I understand they probably don't have data for server load, server requests, number of updates/fixes, and access to any DNS issues.  Someone would need to do a bit of legwork to get all of that.

With all of these information gaps, any claim made that Windows update service outperforms the other 2 update services is meaningless.

Although not open source or Linux related, sometimes the first step to becoming comfortable with using either is to get comfortable with using free software, called freeware.

While playing a multiplayer video game I was interrupted by spiking network activity. My ping would jump to 400 than slowly creep down. Once it reached a normal level, it wouldn't be long before the next spike. Most likely I had spyware or something similar on my machine.

To combat I did my usual cleanup of my computer using Ccleaner, Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-aware. A good look at the state of my firewall was also in order. I currently use TrendMicro's Internet Security product which is both Antivirus, Firewall, Spyware checker etc...

I thought I should try a separate Firewall product and began an internet search for free personal firewalls.  Did I ever hit the jackpot of Windows freeware lists! Gizmo's Tech Support Alert not only had a list and review of free personal firewalls, but also had plenty of other lists for audio, video, productivity, encryption, backup and other freeware software. If you are a MS Windows user who doesn't like to pay for software, you'll want to bookmark this site.

The Inquirer posted some news on Microsoft cracking down on and suing a bunch of resellers caught selling illegitamate copies of Windows XP and a few other products, none of which were Vista. 

You'd think out of the 21 resellers sued, 1 of them would have at least 1 illegal copy of Vista.  That's not the case.  The resellers knew better than to waste their time with Vista.

I really liked this blog I came across called NoCostSoftware.  The blogger talks about going into "Windows Rehab" with depending on Ubuntu 8.04 and seems to have had a very good Ubduction experience.

It lists some nice Ubuntu tips and tricks.