The Soul of Barb's New Machine was creat

Because you're running a crepuscular old version of Windoze on a box won't even give you WWW access1, and you could have a shiny new Linux box (or BSD if you want) for the price of a dozen pizzas, and you have at least a dozen chums lined up here in this very newsgroup to give you all the advice and tech support you could possibly need to get up and running painlessly.

And furthermore, as Rupert points out, questions of bit-rot aside you are at the mercy of your hardware and the "bathtub curve", so it's prudent to have something reliable in place before the current heap o' silicon goes belly up in the middle of the Infobahn at the most inconvenient conceivable time.

Because you deserve a Real Operating System.

Other than that, no reason in particular, if you like your current system.

You have to take into account the bias in your data: you only see people griping when something goes wrong; they are invisible when things go right, which is most of the time.

1 Correction upon re-reading your posting and paying attention: I mean, of course TWO differing and incompatible crepuscular old versions of Windoze on two boxen. For some reason, I can't bring myself to look upon this as a desirable redundancy.

-- Roland HutchinsonÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWillÊplayÊviolaÊdaÊgambaÊforÊfood.

NB mail to my.spamtrap at verizon.net is heavily filtered to remove spam.ÊÊIfÊyourÊmessageÊlooksÊlikeÊspamÊIÊmayÊnotÊseeÊit.