Sorry, like it or not, Windows will deal with more hardware than any other OS (CPU's are not everything). Why? Because hardware developers want to make money. How do they make money? By choosing the most common OS to develop drivers for.

Here is a great example, Phillips and Marrantz have developed new touchscreen remotes and what OS did they pick to talk to there hardware. Windows :-) Why because they wnat to make money. It's what makes the world go round.

Find the slickest printer you can find and I assure it will run on Windows. Find the slickest scanner and it will be Windows. We have $20,000 printer that makes 4 foot wide thermal wax posters and it just plugs into windows and you print. Just as Applications are what's key here so are peripherals.

Corporations are switching from Mac and Unix workstations to PC's. Motorola and DEC to name a couple. Microsoft and 3rd parties are investing huge amounts of money into centrally managing PC's. Even where huge number crunch is done people are now using Windows PC's as front end to number crunching servers. One the few area PC's have not got into is Heavy CAD and Graphics (SGI and Sun). Schools are switching from Mac's or Unix to PC's also.

Look at the 5000 printers, 1000 scanners, 100 camera's. Even technical instruments are switching from Mac to Windows because you just can't find programmers to work on Mac.

Having a monopoly such as micorsoft may not be a good thing, but it's just too damn expensive for companies to deal with multiple OS's. Windows was chosen because it ran on cheap hardware. That's the only reason. I think Microsoft has done a reasonable job in catching up with other OS's and in some areas gone beyond and other areas still is behind.

Windows *IS* the defacto standard. Nobody will say it does everything the best. It's just everywhere, in every country.

Java may change things, but it's still too early to tell yet.

I've worked on Several flavors of Unix, VMS, OS/8, RT-11, DOS, Windows 3.1/9x/NT, TOPS-10, TOPS-20 (one the coolest OS's ever), RSX-11, and I enjoyed them all (DOS perhaps the least). But you won't find me with out windows machine within 30 seconds reach.

Sorry for staying off topic Daniel, but a lot of us don't want to see someone misout on things just because they refuse to run Windows under their roof. A lot of us went through the same transition.

Most of us like what we know and understand. It took me several years to switch from VMS to Unix and it took several years to switch from Unix to Windows. And I still use Emacs on Windows for tough editing jobs.