Wait a minute...
Theoretically, in virtue of the fact that Home can use NTFS, shouldn't it have an "encrypting file system"?

Also, as a note, group policy in XP affects all users: don't expect to restrict specific users from things with it. (Granted, the policy editor in XP can be very useful for modification purposes alone.)

It should, yet I'm on a windows xp home machine and the EFS option is grayed out :(.

At the moment, I'm running SuSE OSS 10.0 on my AMD64 Box, and MacOS 10.4.5 on the PowerPC box :P

Getting a little peeved with SuSE as it won't play any MP3s copied from the Mac via FTP...Switching to Fedora Core :)

I do rember there being some registry hack you can use to use EFS on WinXP Home. I wouldn't know if it works or not, because I use WinXP Pro.

Eh, I really (personally,) wouldn't recommend Fedora. It's OK, but you can do better. Ubuntu is what I recommend, but you won't have MP3 support right off the bat.

But, hey, you'll definitely learn something out of it.

Have you checked out Packman? It has a few packages left out of SuSE for legal reasons.

I use Windows XP. Mainly because I have figured out how to use it so well that if I were to switch, I would have to learn everything all over again. I just hope that I have enough money to get the new version of Windows when it comes out in the next while or so.

Yeah, might just do that :) Thanks guys...

Methinks I'll be reinstalling SuSE then :P

Though you should consider that Windows Vista will revamp several concepts as well, so wether you give an alternate operating system a try which you can legaly obtain for free or buy an expensive upgrade for your Windows, there will be re-learning involved either way. And it's not like every single aspect of, say Linux, is so otherworldly different from Windows, not anymore.

Relearning an OS isn't that hard. In fact if you don't deeply tweak or probe your OS, you won't notice too many differences between how to use Win98SE and WinXP (which is how it should be).

I mac :D on 10.4 ;)
and runs XP Pro virtually when theres a need to.

not many mac useres around here huh o.O

I use Windows XP for gaming and chatting with my people and offline I use ubuntu because its just cool when I get all those "WTF Looks" when I start ubuntu

Those same looks, when compiling something in Gentoo, get magnified ten times. "Did you write all that?!?!?!?"
"Uhh... no."

Nope, not too many, but there's a cadre of us. Before the crash we had a sort of "Mac Users" thread that contained a lot of chat on all things Mac (including requests for help), but that was lost. Maybe one of us should re-make it.

I use Windows XP Pro primarily. I run a separate, slower Linux box with SuSE 10 on it. It's has a Samba server, and acts as primary domain controller so my two little brothers can have roaming profiles, since we have so many computers in the house of varying speeds.

I'm curious if you're going to get MacOSX for the x86 platform. There's a lot of buzz about this, finally you'll be able to dual boot Windows (for all those programs greedy authors won't port) and OSX.
Me? I heven't used a Mac since I graduated from high school (June 2005), I did have a lot of fun getting root access on the school PCs though.

As of yet, a way to dual boot OSX and Windows on the x86 Macs hasn't been found.

Apple's use of EFI (Without BIOS compatibility/emulation) with 32bit chips means that you can't use the EFI compatible Windows (Those intended for Itanium), because they are 64bit only. The 32bit versions of Windows don't work because they require BIOS instead of EFI.

The really sad news is that it appears that Vista will not include EFI support until the release of 'Longhorn Server' in 2007. So what everyone thought would be the easy way of dual booting those two OSes is looking pretty grim. http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/06/03/10/0526237.shtml

XP Professional SP2. So far so good.

I wanted to try Linux yet I don't know what will I use. SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, and Ubuntu makes it confusing as ever.

Yeah, but isn't there hacks of OSX that allow it to run on regular Windows PCs? I know it's not official or anything but it's a start,

Well, yeah, that's the easy solution.

However, it's pretty much useless if you want it the other way around.

How long do you think transitioning to Vista will take? I'm all okay with XP right now. I haven't found their new GUI aero glass really necessary yet. Their new search integration and other various add-ons may be good. They're constantly stressing how you need a "powerful" computer just to run it well. Anyone know if it runs fine with all the gfx options off?

Windows XP Professional, with most of the graphic crap turned off. Tried a dual-boot with Fedora Core 4 that went over pretty well, so as soon as I find a bigger laptop HDD (no less than 60gb), then I'll reinstall it along with XP.

As far as Vista goes, I don't think my laptop would be able to handle it!!

I run Windows XP Pro SP1 due to a recent upgrade (motherboard, graphics card.)
Don't see myself upgrading it to SP2, it works so i'm not going to break it.

Still running Windows XP SP1 as well. I'm not touching SP2 since, well as Domino said, its (SP1) working well.


I wanted to install Ubuntu as well, but meh.. no space >_< Sad....

OK, amongst my many systems:
Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake (Laptop)
Gentoo Linux (Desktop)
Windows XP SP 2 (Mother's desktop)
Windows 98 (Second laptop, only used to connect to my Yamaha keyboard)

I've been a near-exclusive Linux user for years (only dropping to Windows for the odd game here and there), and have yet to have any serious issues with it.. Or I should say that all the problems I have had are from me experimenting with cutting edge pre-alpha software (can anyone say xgl + compiz?)