JoeyR, give it (openoffice) a whirl; it's free and feels just like OfficeXP/2k.

The next time you purchase a PC be sure not to let them nickel and dime you to death. I always want to spec folks machines out for them, 'cause I'll send them a honey of a deal w/ explicit instructions "DO NOT LET THEM SELL YOU ANYTHING ADDITIONAL" and invariable about 2/3 of the time they get upsold. It's like the time share solicitations, it only makes sense if you can say no. With that said, a fews years back I went to a St. Martens and ended up w/ a ridiculously expensive "free boat ride" to the Island of saba. The upside, is I actually made out pretty darned good, but it was by pure chance. I didn't want to buy, didn't want to buy, they kept giving me more points until finally they broke me down. Man was I undisciplined. Got back did research on line (that's why I didn't want to buy right there) turns out I got a bunch of points for a reasonable rate. Now, it's just a matter of actually using them at least every two years. Keeps me honest and forces me to take some fun vacations. Easy to neglect these types of things.

Techman, yeah I was considering the Cellular chipset of PS3 as part of a different computing platform. I bought an XBOX a couple years ago with the explicit purpose of making it my MythTV (Free Dvr, OK really expensive in the end Free DVR), Bought MechWarrior to the software hack to boot linux on it. Never got around to it.

The nice thing about the PS3 is Sony was actually going to allow disks to be sold to boot for appliance like purposes (Video Editing, Audio Editing, Desktop Publishing, etc) so the nice thing is you have a very extensible platform that can really, if not do it all, do a damn good bit of it.

I'm sorry you fell into a pit of jackasses with the Linux forum (trust me there are bunch of us who really want to help nb's out, anyone with a conscience will remember when they were being introduced to the environment). They don't get the groove. I've been working with Linux since I installed Slackware 1.something in 95...I wanted to be a unix SA when I grew up....funny had a chance to be Redhat SA, friends with leads that whole deal, but I kind of got looped into my current gig Managing Support for windows, so my chance passed me by.

As far as your company being in the stone ages, don't sweat it dude. The only real enhancements I really saw with the XP upgrade we went through a couple years back was RDP, Remote Assistance, and Restore As of (which only works some of the time, we use Rollback 3rd party app to get more robust system state restore). We were using VNC before that and being that it integrates into AD now we could have realistically stayed on 2K. With that said, hopefully I can put together a strong enough case to avoid an unnecessary upgrade to Vista and actually get to skip a release.

I agree with you RLSH, probably better to hang w/ XP. You can get all the extry's via enhancements.

That's OK though, I'm a recent convert from Fedora Core 5 was my last to Ubuntu. Very user friendly. If you ever have questions about Linux or linux command, please by all means, hit me up. If I can't figure it out, I can probably find out where it is.