@jordy240 – it’s activated and genuine, it’s an OEM on an HP this guy bought at Fry’s.
@plethora – I’ve run into a grand total of about 9 problems in the 15 years I’ve been working with windows, and most of them stem from dll hell, bloatware, and my fooking around with the OS files. Clean uninstall programs when you need to, keep your startup items below 10, and practice safe browsing and installing, and there should be few errors.
I feel that Macs are a powerful Unix system, shackled 50 different ways, made visually appealing, extremely idiot-proof, and obscenely expensive for their value, and that’s what I don’t need in a system.
@Jewel – The only thing I’ve had a hard time with in Windows 7 after I got used to the permissions system was the extra networking software that assumes the user is an end-user on a SOHO computer. I really like the advanced firewall and very robust permissions system, along with the range of backwards compatibility options. I just disable aero and all those useless visual effects and it hums for me. Sorry you’ve run into a plethora of problems, although it’s to be expected in such a fledgling OS.
@jordy240 – I don’t like those desktop in a box OSes like Ubuntu, SuSE, and MEPis. they’re hard to work with because one wrong move and you’re waist deep in dependency hell, especially when you don’t understand the system, let alone all the software on it. I prefer gentoo and Arch, they force me to comprehend what’s going on and only put on the system what I need.
@Jewel – You’re right, I should take this to the Windows forum. the owner called tech support and they all but gave up on him. I think they settled on mailing his school a windows professional OEM disk for his professor.
Thanks for the comments, all.