Windows 2003 is a great Workstation 12253

There's no firewall in the 64 bit standard edition. Sign me right up!

I would also add that yes, with Linux, I can do real 64 bit development out of the box for that pricepoint in C++.

By comparison, Microsoft has NO 64 bit development product. See the Visual Studio FAQ:

"Visual Studio 2005 Team System is not designed to develop 64-bit applications. But it does run on 64-bit machines."

Which, I downloaded the beta and it is a 32 bit app running in WOW64, dog slow. It blows.

Now, according to this, I can now get a 64 bit compiler with Visual Studio 2005 Professional. Last week it was only with Team System so that's a change in the right direction...

Bu still, I do not get any source control at all at that price point - and I get my pick of source control systems under Linux, including CVS and Subversion and KDevelop integrates with both.

And I haven't even started about code profiling, etc, that I have to upgrade to team system to get?

Under Windows, a sometimes socket connections or talking to a peripheral causes the entire desktop to hang. For example, if I eject a floppy disk, or unmount a CD, the desktop can momentarily hang. Same with if there is a problem with debugging a sockets based application under Windows. The desktop can hang and the typical recourse is to either wait a few seconds or kill explorer and the application and start over. This never happens under Linux.

I can't speak to that. But, Windows didn't work with my SATA hard drive, and Linux did, from their respective CD-DVD images.

Speaking of hardware support, where's motherboard monitoring on Windows these days. Once I downloaded my sensors.conf from Tyan, I get strip charts of all my CPU fan speeds, motherboard temperatures, hard drive temperatures. ... when's Windows going to have that? In fact, Linux even logs when someone opens up my case. Does Windows have that support? Where's the 64 bit motherboard driver?

See, you're talking to a ten year Windows developer, who has written his own Windows database server and client, here:

I'm not one of these guys bought into a religion of using Linux for the sake of Linux. I just want to develop 64 bit applications without breaking the bank and Microsoft simply comes up short.

Let me know when they don't.