On Wednesday 28 February 2007 01:24, John Andersen wrote:
The down side of that is SLED with a $50/year price tag will quickly outpace the cost of XP.
Nonsense, John. Windows Vista costs far more to buy and to use than SuSE SLED. First, SLED will run on most anything that's reasonably current. For Vista, you're going to need a new DirectX 9-compliant 3D 128-MB video card that supports Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware and WDDM (Windows Device Driver Model) driver. You'll do a lot better, though, with 256MB of RAM. And Vista is turning into a real memory hog, with many reports suggesting you need up to 2GB of ram just to get it to run decently. Any box with 512 MB of ram is going to run SLED just fine. Microsoft does supply its own antivirus and anti-spam software, Windows Live OneCare. But, it will cost your company $50 a desktop per year. SuSE SLED, on the other hand, comes with Clam AV for free. If you want to buy Microsoft Vista, you're going to fork out $299 for the suggested retail price for Windows Vista Business. Even if you get the upgrade version it'll cost you $199. And don't forget you can get a three year subscription to SLED for $125. Cost for Vista over three years? Extra Ram and Upgraded video card $300 AntiVirus and Antispam subscription $150 Microsoft Vista Business Edition $299 Total $749 Cost for SuSE SLED for three years $125 And we haven't even started to compare the costs of the other proprietary software Microsoft wants to sell you, like Microsoft Office. Even if your existing computer has the horsepower to run Vista, which will be doubtful, and you ignore everything except the cost of the operating system, Vista is still twice as expensive as SLED. Bob Smits bob@rsmits.ca -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org