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One thing to tie into the season, a live CD like ubuntu among others is a great way to shop online for Christmas presents without risking there being any kind of record for someone to see what you got them. A friend of mine uses this method to shop for his wife, private mode on your browser does leave some traces...

In all honesty unless the people in my family get a lot smarter they will never know where to find those traces. I am the only geek in the family. I do like his methods though and had never thought about that.

I like the idea with the live CD :-) Another way to accomplish the same goal is a virtual machine on your Linux box. You can launch it directly from your Linux installation and eliminates the reboot and fiddling with a CD. And it is all for free. Even with a Windows OS you can download virtual box from Oracle and launch another OS of your choice. And it is free too. The only issue with Windows as a host OS is the fact a virus scanner and/ or security software has to be purchased.

I realize this is weeks later, but if you just want to mess around with Linux distros and see if you like them, there are live CD's available that don't require installation or wiping out your existing OS.

You can also grab something like VirtualBox and install Linux to that, which will let you try out as many distros as you want and let you goof around without worrying about breaking anything.

We dumped all Microsoft from our computers about seven years ago. Played around with lots of different distros over the years. Right now we are running Lubuntu on both computers.

openSUSE 13.1 now and not a single issue. Even Skype works like a charm. Knock on wood and get ready for the next release. It seems like Libre Office is bug free too now.
And I don't miss paying MS & Co at all!

We are big on Office / iPhone products are work. My understanding is we dumped Blackberry a few years ago. I can say I don't miss working at the bank and dealing with Lotus Notes and Domino Servers. I love my linux box and how stable I am able to make it with customization's. My previous employer we used Novell SuSe. I loved if for our offsite back up server. We ran that and RHEL for our PostGres SQL database servers. I tried like hell to get them off IIS though. Couldn't do it because the owner wanted a nice WYSIWYG to make the website.

A nice WYSYWIG? Look at Apache and all the modules written for it. There is no lack of features compared to IIS anymore.

One more reason to stick with Linux. MS really pulls the plug on Windows XP now.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57618 ... ndows-8.1/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

IMO Microsoft will do everything they can to scare people away from XP and into 8.1, but in truth they are running-out of Security holes to fill in XP, and in any case one can typically fill those holes with 3rd party protection e.g. Comodo or Kaspersky or what-have-you.

So unless you find a new program that you have to have that doesn't work properly with XP there's really no reason to panic and bail on it. I in fact have one PC that runs software that ONLY works on XP (will not function properly on any of Vista, W7, or 8.x), and that PC will remain in my stable for as long as I need/want to use that particular software.

Dito. I have one Windows 8.1 Laptop, transferred all my business apps I may need to it and turned it off. It took me a week to get everything working I had on running on XP.
But my main OS I'm using is Linux and I'd say 95% of my tools are running just fine. All it took was to restructure and those 5% missing are just REXX scripts I used with a special com application. Most important for me was to get the functionality of MS Excel but with Libre Office I have not missed a single feature so far.
But looking around at different discount outlets I could not find anything cheaper than a laptop or PC with Windows 8.x installed.

Well, if you use Linux you won't be able to install it like on a Windows platform :-))
But envelope printing should not be an issue at all. I use Libre office version: 4.1.4.2
Build ID: 410m0(Build:2). Which one did you have problems with.
I do remember having issues with some printing formats but that was related to the printer setup and drivers.

I understand that :-) Try following if you get a chance. In Windows 8.x, create 2 administrative users with a MS Skydrive account and than delete one. Let me know what you find out.