Reviews and Ratings
Let's face it: I'm not a fan of Windows. I never was, and never will be. Why? Crashes, buffer overflows galore, lack of security, and the oh so famous BSOD.
Yet I have to support it. So I did have to get used to it.
When I started using Wine on my Linux box to test some Windows software, I discovered ReactOS, and saw that it shared some libraries with Wine. I also saw that it reproduced the Windows look and feel, but did so without any of the flaky Microsoft code under the hood.
That's right, this is a completely different beast here.
I've since downloaded and tried several of the alpha versions, and have been pleasantly surprised. Even from the start, ReactOS plays fair, listens to you (instead of you listening to it), and ran a good amount of Windows software right out of the box. Games that support OpenGL (e.g. Quake, Unreal) ran great, and with some of the recent work done, more complex applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org now run with little trouble!
Best of all, the system requirements for ReactOS are very low; a 32MB system will happily boot ReactOS, and the entire installation on my test machine (an old Pentium 120 laptop with 48 MB RAM and a 1.2GB hard drive) took up a slim 50MB. Most of the hardware on the laptop wasn't supported (the sound system wasn't recognized, but ROS currently doesn't have full sound support anyway), but what worked does so with gusto.
This certainly is a great project in the works. An open source Windows-like environment for those who either don't want to or are unable to run Linux; ReactOS is one project I am truly going to watch.
A simple solution to save your sanity and bandwidth:
1) Grab Firefox,
2) Download Adblock Plus,
3) Install ABP,
4) Laugh as all those pesky ads get blocked!
With ABP, pages that are normally ad-heavy load much faster and look much cleaner. And it doesn't matter if they're Flash, animated GIF, or whatnot... ads are TRULY "so yesterday"!
I discovered Rockbox back in October of 2006, but I had no supported DAP to try it on. When I received a 30GB iPod video for Xmas, I went straight to the Rockbox site, downloaded it, and installed.
And I was floored.
Rockbox does everything Apple should have done right from the start: true drag-and-drop support (via Apple's Disk Mode or OF), playback of many different audio codecs (including favorites Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Musepack, and others), plugins, better battery life than the original firmware on many of the non PortalPlayer-based targets, and growing improvements every day.
With a growing list of supported targets, an excellent, very mature code base, and more features than you can ever imagine, Rockbox deserves its place on any savvy user's DAP!