Microsoft is going to like this.

[Vic C.]

:-D

http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

It's called, ReactOS and its designed to look and feel like Windows, is compatible with many products from Windows software and hardware vendors and...


It's free. :-D

The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.

LMBO! :

 

[Lewis]

Hmmmmm

 

[Vic C.]

If it supports multiple boot, I might give it a try alongside Windows and Ubuntu at work. Pray I don't corrupt my master boot record again! :-D

 

[Photosmith]

If it supports multiple boot, I might give it a try alongside Windows and Ubuntu at work. Pray I don't corrupt my master boot record again! :-D

Have you tried any disk backup software? I back up my PC's with Acronis True Image pretty regularly so in the event of a total disk failure (had one just about two years ago myself) I'm never out very much data. I use external hard drives and always keep one in a deposit box at the bank, so even if my whole house burns down, I still have at least a ~2 week old copy of my data available as soon as I have someplace to live and a computer to restore the data to. It's nice software, because you can boot from CD, then back up the whole hard drive, regardless of what OS, or how many OS's you have on the disk. It might be handy to have if you're planning to install another flavor OS and don't want to risk losing data.

 

[stovebolts]

Well Vic, you go on ahead and let us know how it turns out. :wink:

Was checking out their browser and it felt like a clunky mix of Linux, Windows 3.11 and 2000 (Notice the PIF like "Command Prompt" that is using the default icon?)

 

[Vic C.]

If it supports multiple boot, I might give it a try alongside Windows and Ubuntu at work. Pray I don't corrupt my master boot record again! :-D

Have you tried any disk backup software? I back up my PC's with Acronis True Image pretty regularly so in the event of a total disk failure (had one just about two years ago myself) I'm never out very much data. I use external hard drives and always keep one in a deposit box at the bank, so even if my whole house burns down, I still have at least a ~2 week old copy of my data available as soon as I have someplace to live and a computer to restore the data to. It's nice software, because you can boot from CD, then back up the whole hard drive, regardless of what OS, or how many OS's you have on the disk. It might be handy to have if you're planning to install another flavor OS and don't want to risk losing data.

Thanks. At work it's not an issue. Data stored on backed up network drives. Plus, at home and work, data is separated from OS; always on a separate partition and usually on a separate physical drive.

I'm fairly secure in my partitioning skills, so I'm not too worried about losing anything...except my MBR and from my last experience, I got that covered. :

 

[Vic C.]

On second thought, this OS has some restrictions on where it wants to be installed and how it's bootloader (FreeLoader) communicates with the various OS's boot sectors. It wants to be THE bootloader, but I rather use GRUB. I'm lazy. :-D I don't want to manually edit boot files if I don't have to. My GRUB has a gui that makes configuration rather easy.

Maybe I'll sandbox one of my spare PCs or scrap the experiment for now. :smt102

 

[Photosmith]

One can never have too many PC's, huh? I'm up to 4 in my home now including my work laptop, and I still feel like I could use 1 or 2 more for various special purpose applications.

 

[Vic C.]

Well I do have some room on the bench at work in our techroom. Also, my main PC does have two EIDE headers and four SATA headers. That's a total of eight possible drives. Subtract two for DVD/CD drives and I still have six at my disposal.

I could then mount a few toggle switches on the side cover of the tower, tap into the ground leads of each drive and switch them on and off as needed. :-D