Everyone using Windows knows the nag screen that comes up every 10 or so minutes after you've automatically updated XP and refuses to die. I don't understand why a patch that Microsoft thought could wait up to a month (to fit in the monthly cycle), is suddenly so important after installation that it needs an opportunity to be applied every ten fucking minutes. It just disrupts my workflow. A quick search on Google however gave me the solution to kill it:

Or an even better .

Pay too much for the same hardware?

Better than paying to get pwned by crappy software.

a better solution
http://www.us.debian.org/

I'm already thinking of switching to (K)ubuntu Linux. The only thing that's really drawing me back to my XP partition is my media player, Foobar2000. Amarok just doesn't come close.

I use xp for games. To be honest, I think everything else I do has a Linux counterpart. Some of it is even better. I like The Gimp, I'm fine with the mp3 players, bittorrent has linux clients, firefox of course has a linux variant...

But I can't play Vanguard or Stalker in Linux.

I would LOVE to see linux compatible versions of games come out, simultaneous with the Windows release. I think I'd ditch Windows entirely.

Have you tried to play those games through Wine? Wine is not guaranteed to work with every game, but some games work on Wine without a big performance loss.
I just can't stand the interface of The Gimp. It also seems to have little development for the past few years. On Windows I'm starting to use and like Paint.Net more and more, a Linux port is planned. Most people don't have high needs for a music player, but I want to be able to store the number of plays and ratings into the tags of music files. Other players store that in a database, and if anything happens to that, all your info is lost. My entire collection won't corrupt that easily. is a very bare player, but with plugins I can make it do anything I want. Compared to that, even Amarok looks Gnome-ishly unconfigurable. Also aMule sucks, but I believe eMule in Wine works too, although I haven't tried that yet. For the rest, Linux all the way.