Everyone want to hear a familliar story? I have had a spare Mobo rattling around the house, spare HD, DVD, PSU the works. Okay, time to make a entertainment computer for the living room. Hook everything up in a card board box to make sure it's working, and the sety up is fine, Windows XP even booted up! Hooray! So Step 2 -Windows Upddate I fire up, install 3 updates - Restart Updgrade Divx - Restart Upgrate so SP2! - get older, read the register for an hour and a half, Restart Download 38 more updates - Restart Now by this point more than three hours had passed. I stumbled overto bed and collapsed. (7 am at this point). What the Hell?!? Have I been using a mactoo long? I should have KNOWN to allot myself half a day just to update holes, patch the roof, put a plastic dogin the door and tell strangers I might be more secure. For a computer without a net connection, maybe I should have run naked, and hoped to high hell that any files computer comes accross are safe. But somehow, for some reason, I have Trust. Trust that microsoft releases their updates for a reason. Trust that maybe I'm better off with them than without. And then I think, Damnit, Linux. Why Didn;t I just pop on a linux forum and ask if there wasa media capable distro with DVD playback, and all the codeccs I would need? Oh well I may be 4 hours older post windows install, but atleasst I do get to use the most powerful and versatile media player on the planet. Win amp.
It doesn't matter what OS you select - they will all take you a whole day to rebuild from scratch. If it's Windows, then you should have slipstreamed the latest SP to cut down on time. If it is OSX then you basically have to keep paying $100 every three months, from 10.0 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4, Panther, Tiger, oh my, if you don't want to spend hours downloading patches you got to pay the money. In Linux it all depends on the distro cycle, wjether it is Fedora, where you have to upgrade every three months, to SuSE which have yearly cycles. Even with Linux it is best if you just start with a fresh install of the new kernel and then re-install all your apps and set it up just like the old system. PCs are not consoles...
White Feather - I agree, skipping SP2 would have saved me an hour and a half. As for linux, if I knew 100% that I could run any video files i happen to DL illigaly, then I would happily go that route. The nice thing with Mac, s the OS is pre installed. I'd be content running win2k or 98 if everythhing would work. it just so happend that i had XP installed on the drive.
He means to say that the video files he has are illegal, not Linux. And, every possible codec can be downloaded for Linux, so that's not really a problem.
Syntax - While all possible codecs can be downloaded, I'd rather be lazy and have them included in a distrobution shameful I know
