Rich,
Stata will run no matter what, that's not a terribly sophisticated
software in terms of using some weird internal architecture and odd
drivers and unstable OS code and such. I have a Vista workstation with
Stata being pretty much the only application constantly running; it is
only a simulation platform, and I am happy with that as is -- I turn
the screen on for ten minutes, start a new thread, copy the data down,
and I am done. However if I had to do some real work and install and
run a bunch of applications (at any given time, I rarely have fewer
than ten applications running -- Stata, a browser, a mail client, a
file manager, text editor, Acrobat, etc., plus all the crap Windows
puts in, plus all those update agents sitting in the background, and
Bill Gates only knows what else), I'd most likely hate it: it is
absolutely paranoid about security, and Stata Corp. had to change
their help files extensions because of that: you cannot really copy
.hlp files under Vista since it thinks those are Windows help files,
and the latter are known to have security issues (or at least Vista
believes those are dangerous... go figure).
It is prohibitively difficult these days to get an XP machine though;
everything comes with Vista unless you install XP from your own
distribution disks.
Linux is generally lighter than Windows; it will not consume as much
resources as Windows does, so you will have the feeling of the
applications running "faster" (although it is a matter of interaction
between the OS and the application rather than the processing power of
the machine itself). The only reason I got Vista for my simulation
platform is because the Linux support is close to non-existent in our
department/college of A&S, and since I only have one application
running I am not expecting Vista to crash (and it didn't). If most of
your other applications are strictly Windows based then there is
probably no point in getting Linux.
--
Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name
Small print: I use this email account for mailing lists only.
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