I have had my laptop for about three years already, and I kinda feel like I want to buy a new one. Well, I don’t have the money the buy a new laptop, but, other than that, I’m left with not much of a choice (In terms of operating systems).
What is there to offer? Winblows (I meant Windows)? Nah, sorry. I’ve had enough of Microsux crap, Win ‘95, 2000, Xp, Vista and soon Winblows 7? Well, it has a cool eye candy (Aero) and GUI, but it’s still Microsux product. I’ve never had Vista, but I have helped some friends with Vista problems. My only comment about it is, I don’t like it. It is more difficult to customize and NOT user friendly. Xp is much better, although it doesn’t have a cool eye candy.
Besides, if you buy a new laptop, you’ll get ‘millions’ of crapwares inside (Regardless of its brand name, except for an Apple): AOL, eBay crap, Norton anti-virus and lots of other junks that you don’t even need (Or you don’t even know, what the h311 they are for). It will take hours to uninstall them and customize your laptop and you are left with a prone to BSoD, RSoD, Trojan Horses, etc. operating system. You need to install Spybot, Ad-Aware, an anti-virus and a firewall. And you HAVE TO update the first three everyday, and you know, running an anti-virus takes a lot of memory. It slows down your system. In the mean time, some background Winblows processes, like explorer, overcome (I’m just exaggerating here) your system, and you’re still left with a fragile operating system.
And, the main thing that I don’t like about Winblows is its file system. Why use NTFS or FAT? You have to defrag your system every now and then, and, like running an anti-virus, it takes up much of your memory. If you rarely or never defrag your system, it will take forever to finish the entire process and it slows down your system. Indeed, after defragmentation and cleaning your disk from unnecessary stuff (I dare to guarantee), your system will run a little faster, but you are still left with an unstable operating system.
So, there is really nothing to offer out there. I could get a Mac, but it costs more money. It is more secure than any Winblows products; besides, its kernel is based on FreeBSD, which is far more superior than my system, Linux. You don’t have to worry about the annoyances that I mentioned above. It has a cool eye candy and GUI; it is more stable and customizable; it is well recommended for any types of graphics editing needs. You may not have to worry about installing an anti-virus. And, if you are gamers, you can play some Winblows games on a Mac.
However, I still prefer Linux. I am no hardcore programmer, but I enjoy the freedom of using the operating system. Of course it is not easy at first; of course, you need to learn everything (again) from the beginning; of course, you will suffer while customizing it: your graphics card, your wireless, etc., but after you are completely satisfied with your system, you don’t have to worry about spywares, adwares, crapwares, viruses, trojan horses, BSoDs, RSoDs, and so on. And, there are a lot of different choices of desktop environments, flavors (distributions), eye candies, etc, including file system. You want a secure file system? You can try ext3 or ReiserFS (NO defragging necessary). You are free to choose. Above all, it’s FREE!!! You don’t have to spend your Dollars or Euros for any kinds of software. You can even use it in your own language (I’ve been switching between English, French and German), 
.
The whole point to this is, do you want to know how a computer works? Use open source operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, etc). Or do you want to use a computer, without even worrying what a kernel is, what memory allocation is, and so on, as long as you have a user friendly, easily customizable, secure and stable operating system without the annoyances I mentioned above (This is a tricky one as long as the computer world is dominated by Winblows empire)?
So, I guess, there really is no point in buying a new laptop, unless I want a faster processor or graphics card. You know, AMD recently released a 2.7-GHz processor? I am no hardcore gamer, but it won’t hurt having a faster processor.
I wish LAPTOP manufacturers would sell laptops without pre-installed operating system, but I still have the option to choose which processor, graphics card or network card that I want in my laptop. That is just perfect!
