IBM

Squeezing some life out of an aging Windows 2000 PC

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

I can safely say I really did write the book on Windows optimization (Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia, O’Reilly, 1999, ISBN 1565926773) but that was five years ago and covered Windows 95 and 98.

Windows 2000 and XP are a different animal, and are as similar to the obscure OS/2 operating system from IBM as they are to Windows 95/98.

Here’s what I did when my work computer slowed to the point that I could no longer do much work.Clear some disk space. This is a biggie. NTFS, Windows’ file system, really doesn’t like it if the amount of free space on a disk drops below 15 percent. That’s stupid, but it’s reality, and since I don’t have Mr. Gates’ phone number I can’t do much but live with it. I went to Start, Search, picked Files and Folders, typed *.* in the name field and Drive C in the Look in: field, then hit Search Now. When it finished, I clicked on the field that says Size, and scrolled all the way down. I found lots of big files I didn’t need. I found a mystery file that was 600 megs in size. A Google search revealed that some obscure application I had used once had created that file. That was nice of it. After five minutes’ work, I had freed almost a gigabyte of disk space.

Uninstall old printer drivers. I had a bunch of printer drivers installed for printers I don’t use anymore. They were taking up disk space and memory. I only have 192 megs of RAM and most of it was in use by the time the computer booted, before I’d even loaded any programs. That’s no good. So I removed the drivers for my girlfriend’s Epson color printer (in the Add/Remove Programs control panel) and then I went into Printers and deleted the network printers of old clients and other printers I can’t remember ever using (in most cases you can just delete the printer and it will offer to remove the drivers).

Stop unnecessary services. If you right-click on My Computer and hit Manage, then double-click on Services and Applications and then on Services, you’ll find all sorts of stuff that Windows runs just in case you need it. Most of it is necessary, but for me, several were just chewing up more RAM than I could afford.

Computer Browser. This service, despite what you hear elsewhere, has nothing to do with web browsing, My Network Places, or anything else useful. All it does is permit your computer to participate in browser elections. What are those? It’s a long story, but the gist of it is that on a Windows network, one computer gets to keep the list of computers on the network, and every time you turn a computer on, the computers running the Computer Browser service fight over who gets to keep that list. Sound useless? Unless you’re in an office network with a file server and a very small number of computers, it’s very useless. Most of the time it’s just chewing up between 2 and 8 megabytes of your precious RAM. Forget that.

HID Input Service. I plugged a USB mouse into this computer once and it loaded this. Next thing I knew, my available memory had dropped by 6 megabytes. Six megabytes! For a stupid mouse? I use a USB mouse occasionally, but not every day, and certainly not often enough to be able to afford dedicating 6 megs to something that sits there waiting for me to plug one in. I’d leave it if I had 512 megs of RAM but I didn’t, so I disabled it.

Automatic Updates and Background Intelligent Transfer Service. I keep Automatic Updates turned off because it doesn’t work with our firewall, but whether the option is turned on or off, these services are loaded and chewing up memory. So I disabled these services. I have mixed feelings on Automatic Update. If you can’t remember to visit the Windows Update site once a month, you should leave it turned on. But since it won’t work for me anyway, I have to leave it turned off, so I might as well recover the memory.

Remote Registry Service. This allows a network administrator to connect to your computer and make changes. In a home environment you won’t use this. At work you’ll probably get your hand slapped if you disable it. It uses about a meg.

By trimming some of this dead wood, I was able to gain almost 32 megs of RAM.

Uninstall programs you’re not using anymore. I had several programs that I hadn’t used since Clinton was president that were taking up space on my drive, and some of them had been so nice as to install services that were running all the time and chomping some of my very scarce system RAM. Clearing those out gained me a couple hundred megs’ worth of disk space and nearly 20 megs of RAM.

Clear the browser cache. Internet Explorer keeps pieces of web sites on disk in case you ever visit them again, because it’s much faster than downloading them again. The problem is it does a terrible job of cleaning these up, so the result is you have, in all likelihood, tens of thousands of tiny files, if not hundreds of thousands, that you’ll never use again. Right-click your IE icon on the desktop, hit properties, and click Delete Files. You’ll save yourself some disk space, but more importantly, you’ll make this next step a lot faster and more effective.

Defrag. I used to be really good about defragmenting my drives but it looks like I’ve been lax lately because my C drive was in bad, bad shape. Go to Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools and pick Disk Defragmenter. Run it once a month.

My drive, as it turned out, was hopelessly fragmented. The system was much peppier after I ran it.

I hope these steps will be helpful. It’s not as good as getting a new computer, but it’s much easier to live with now. If your system is bogged down, and like mine, it’s an old laptop that uses scarce and expensive memory and is out of slots anyway, this will make it easier to live with.

Next time you want to forge some documents…

Dave Farquhar Society

Dan’s aging documents how-to really should have been required reading for CBS.

Found on Dvorak’s blog: Ebay listing for RARE IBM Selectric. Of course it’s rare. On Ebay, if it’s something no longer available at Target or Wal-Mart, it’s rare.And from looking at the typewriter, it looks like it’s in pretty good shape, especially considering its age. Since we Ebayers always grade on a curve, I suppose it therefore must be mint condition. Or maybe it’s MINT+++++++++++.

I suppose we should be glad that most people who have sufficient cranial matter to do a forgery right also have a few billion other things they really need to get done yesterday.

I do too. Excuse me while I go look for something really rare. Like secure software from Microsoft.

No Bob jokes, please.

The big question: PC or Mac?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , , ,

I haven’t stirred the pot in a while, so to prove that I am a professional writer after all, I’ll go tackle the most inflammatory question I can imagine, something that makes Bush vs. Kerry look like a game of paddy-cake.

What’s the better computer, a PC or a Macintosh?OS X closely follows the history of the first Macintosh in that the first version showed lots of promise, but had lots of problems, probably shipped too soon, and lacked some important capabilities. But Apple, to its credit, washed its dirty laundry in public, fixing the problems and adding capabilities. And now, OS X has a reputation as something that “just works.” And it has something to back it up with.

Windows XP, well, that joke about 32-bit extensions to a 16-bit graphical interface on top of an 8-bit operating system originally written for 4-bit computers by a 2-bit corporation that can’t stand 1 bit of competition is almost true. Microsoft bought the 8-bit OS from a company that may have stolen it. And while Gary Kildall‘s first operating system was 4-bit, he may have written CP/M from scratch. But I digress.

Unlike Apple, Windows XP tries really hard for backward compatibility. And for all the stink about the things SP2 breaks, I’ll bet you a dollar you can go download the 1981 edition of VisiCalc for MS-DOS and it’ll run just as well on your three-point-whatever gig Pentium 4 running XP as it did on the first IBM PC. And if you can find old copies of WordStar and dBASE II and Turbo Pascal, chances are they’ll run too. Old programs that break are at least as likely to break because of timing problems with CPUs that are almost a thousand times faster than they expect as they are because of Windows. Probably more.

Sure, you’ll find programs that break, but you’ll probably find a thousand that work for every one that breaks. Especially if you limit yourself to titles that aren’t games.

This is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that software you bought almost a quarter century ago still runs if you need it. If you think that isn’t important, I’ll introduce you to one of my clients who’s still using dBASE II. It sure is important to him. The curse is all that spaghetti code you need to keep those billions and billions of old programs running.

I have a little bit more sympathy for Microsoft when I remember that Windows XP is really OS/2 1.3 with DOS bolted on, and Windows 3.1 and 98 bolted on next door.

Just a little.

When you look at it that way, is it any wonder that sometimes when you plug in your digital camera it acts goofy?

But truth be told, more often than not, your mouse and your digital camera and all your other stuff works, whether you plug it into a Windows box or a Mac. And when it doesn’t work, it’s every bit as infuriating on a Mac as it is on a Windows PC. When Windows has an error code, it spits one out in hexadecimal. The Mac spits out an error code in decimal. I guess that makes the Mac friendlier.

But I guess it doesn’t matter whether I say “deleterious” in English or in Pig Latin. It’s still not going to be a word you’re likely to have heard today, either way. And there’s a decent chance it’ll send you reaching for a dictionary (or Google).

I’ll be frank: I hated OS 9 and OS 8 and everything else that came before it. I tried to get the Mac Toss turned into an official olympic sport. If there are any old Macintoshes in the pond in front of the office building where I used to fix Macintoshes, I know nothing about them.

But Apple knew it was b0rken and threw it away and bought something better. I still think they bought the wrong something better and would have gotten here a lot sooner if they’d bought BeOS, but they bought NeXT and got Steve Jobs back, so here they are.

All things being equal, I’d go with a Mac, if only because it’s got a Unix layer underneath it.

But all things aren’t equal. Macintoshes cost a lot of money. And when you’re 2 percent of the market, you don’t have a lot of software to choose from. I know. I had long love affairs with Amiga and with OS/2 before I threw in the towel and installed Windows. And it wasn’t until 1997 that I actually used Windows as my everyday OS.

When someone hands me a disk, I can read it. When someone tells me I’ve gotta try out this new program, it runs.

On the other hand, there’s virtually no problem with viruses and spyware on the Macintosh. If I want to spy on people or cause enough damage to make the front page of USA Today, I’m going to set my sights on 90+% of the market instead of the Macintosh’s 2%. Being a minority can have its advantages.

But, after living for years with good computers and operating systems that were years or even decades ahead of their time but had no software availability, I run Windows most of the time and exercise caution to keep my system clean. I don’t use Internet Explorer, I keep my virus definitions up to date, I don’t read e-mail from strangers and don’t open unexpected attachments, and I don’t install freeware software unless it’s open source.

And guess what? I don’t have any problems with my computer either.

I know and respect other people who’ve gone the other way. For me, there never was much choice other than PC hardware. I can afford a Macintosh, but that’s money I really need to be putting towards paying off my car and my house sooner, or saving for retirement. Or any number of other things. I’m a legendary tightwad.

Other people may have had their own other reasons for making the same decision.

Is this Apple a surprise to anyone?

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , , , , , ,

So, Apple unveiled its new Imac today. (I’m sick of improper capitalization. We speak English, not C++.) To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, it has a bigger screen. And I’m sure it’s not too surprising that they crammed everything into the unit next to the screen. It’s the next logical step, after the lamp-shaped Imac.

So how’s it gonna do?I think it has potential. Do people really want laptops because they can carry them everywhere they go, or do they want laptops because they can move them about the house freely and don’t have to have a dedicated “computer room”?

I suspect to most people, the latter is more important. Most people have better things to do with their lives than surf the ‘net at Starbucks or Panera Bread.

This new Imac can go on a small desk in a study or spare bedroom and not take over an entire wall the way computers have been doing since the late 1970s. As long as there’s a way to add some memory, and there are ports for people to plug in their digital cameras and their portable MP3 players and a printer, they’ll be happy.

Who knows, maybe demand for wireless printers will increase too.

Some analysts have said they don’t think all-in-one is the slam dunk it was in 1998. I agree it isn’t, but small is a slam dunk. Witness the explosive popularity of cube PCs. Yes, it flopped for Apple, but Apple’s cubes lacked the flexibility, there was too much confusion about their expandability and what exactly they were compatibile with–I designed a Mac network for a client right around the time the Cube was released, but the rumor was it would only work with Apple monitors. That alone killed the deal. They bought G4 towers instead, which would work with NEC and Viewsonic monitors.

But the other problem with the Cube was the price. Yes, it was cheaper than a G4 tower. But the price difference wasn’t enough to make people willing to take a chance on it. And besides, if it was cheapness you wanted, there were at least four companies willing to sell you a PC for half the price of a Cube. Emachines would even sell you a PC for half the price of an Imac.

And that’s the biggest problem I see with this new Imac: price. $1299 gets you in the game. Ten years ago, that was cheap. But this isn’t 1994. Emachines didn’t exist in 1994, and while a Mac would cost you more than a Packard Bell, there wasn’t much price difference between a Mac and a Compaq or an IBM. Compaq or IBM usually had one model that sold for a hundred or two less than the cheapest Apple, and Apple usually wouldn’t give you quite as much CPU speed or quite as much disk space, but if you walked into the store with $1500 in your pocket, which was pretty much the selling price of an average PC, you could walk out with a Mac just as easily as you could walk out with something that ran Windows.

What will Dell give you today for $800? 2.8 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive, CD burner, printer, 17-inch monitor, and some software.

For the same money, Apple gives you 1.25 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, CD burner, and a 17-inch display. No printer.

For $1,299, the price of the new Imac, Dell gives you twice the CPU power and twice the memory. Just not as much wow factor.

Yes, I know the Pentium 4 is a horribly inefficient processor but the design does scale surprisingly well, and efficiency alone won’t make up a 1.6 GHz speed deficit. Besides, if you’re willing to spend four figures, you can get an AMD Opteron. Just not from Dell.

Will this Imac sell? Yes. Will it do much to increase Apple’s 2.2 percent market share? I doubt it. The main audience is going to be people with aging CRT-based Imacs who’ve been holding out for something with a G5 in it. They’ll buy it, find it’s a lot faster than their old one and takes up less space. Of course they’ll like it. But it’s still the Amiga problem. The Amiga didn’t take over the market because it it only sold 6 million units. The Amiga was a commercial failure because those 6 million units sold to 1.5 million people.

People will ooh and ah over how little space this new Imac takes and how convenient its wireless keyboards are. But most of them will buy a Dell because it’s faster. Or cheaper. Or both. Maybe they’ll complain about how much less convenient it is, but it’s just as likely they’ll forget about it.

It happened with the first Imac and it happened with the Cube and it happened with the dual G4 and it happened with the G5. Who are we kidding? To some extent, it’s been happening since 1983 when the Lisa came out. People see the machine and it knocks their socks off until they see the price tag. The classes buy it anyway, while the masses figure out how to get by with something cheaper.

History is going to repeat itself one other way too. Somewhere in the Far East, I guarantee you a no-name maker of whitebox PCs is designing a box that puts the brains of the outfit behind the LCD, just like this Imac. Maybe the thought didn’t occur to the designer until this week. Maybe the designer has been working on it for months already.

It will look a lot like this new Imac, only it will have an AMD or Intel processor in it, and it will run Windows. It might be three months before we see it. It might even be six. But it will appear, and it will be priced under $1,000.

It will sell. And within another six months, everyone will be doing it. This new form factor may not come to dominate the market, but it won’t take much for it to outsell this new Imac. A small percentage of 97.8 percent is likely to be a lot bigger than even a large percentage of 2.2 percent. Compared to the new Imac, these clones will look like a runaway success.

And Mac fanatics will be screaming about another Apple innovation stolen by someone else.

No surprises in the PC Magazine reliability/service survey

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

It’s that time of year again. Time for PC Magazine’s annual reliability and service survey. I’ve been reading it for almost half my life, and half a lifetime ago, it really meant something.

Today, the subtitle ought to be “What happens when you outsource.”So what does happen when you outsource? All the PCs are basically the same these days. It makes sense. We’re down to three or four suppliers for almost all of the chips on the motherboard, and everyone, including the big vendors, buy their motherboards from one of a half dozen or so companies now. Some contract manufacturer in the Far East puts them all together and puts some other company’s name on it.

The good news is that if there’s a secret to building good, reliable PCs, it’s really poorly kept. The basic hardware is much more reliable today than a decade ago. Back when I sold computers at retail, I remember a Compaq sales rep complaining bitterly that Intel’s “Intel Inside” campaign was hurting them by making everyone think all computers were the same inside. At the time they weren’t. Compaq’s engineering and rigorous testing didn’t always produce the fastest PCs, but they were always near the top, and it did produce some really reliable stuff.

Would that same philosophy applied to today’s technology yield something better? It’s impossible to know. Compaq PCs are exactly the same as everyone else’s these days. The good news is the hardware is about as problem-free as it was back then. And so is everyone else’s. The only difference is the software the manufacturer loads on them.

You may be surprised, but even the bargain-basement eMachines scored high on reliability ratings. It turns out it’s cheaper to get things right the first time than it is to cut corners on quality and have to accept lots of returns. Their machines were dirt cheap, the company was profitable, and the reliability was good. That’s why Gateway bought them and then turned management of the combined company over to the eMachines management.

Speaking of Gateway, support is almost uniformly lousy across the board. People have always complained to me that the support people don’t know what they’re doing. Now it’s hard to know how much the phone techs know because you can’t understand them.

Someone has got to realize this makes poor business sense and make a change. IBM knows, but IBM doesn’t sell PCs at retail anymore. In the early ’90s, Gateway had tremendous brand loyalty. Their PCs were terrible, but the tech support was friendly and determined. When Dell and others started undercutting Gateway’s prices, they cut costs by decimating their tech support. The result was lousy computers and no help getting the problem fixed. The only thing left to do was to buy eMachines, whose management had walked into a similarly bad situation in 2001 and righted it.

It’s pretty obvious to me that the way to break this logjam of sameness is to offer first-rate technical support. I want to believe that the first company that moves its technical support back to the United States and advertises the fact would even be able to get by with charging a premium price.

In the meantime, you stand to get slightly better support by buying from a retail store rather than over the phone or web, if only because the store will be able to help you with basic questions. The quality of in-store help varies widely, but if you find good help in the store, find out that person’s name and ask for that person if you have to call again. Most people who are really good don’t stay in retail for long–at least one company here in St. Louis scouts the retail stores’ computer help and tries to hire away anyone over the age of 21 or 22 who seems to be any good–but you may get some good help in the meantime. Use the manufacturer’s support as a backup, if the store will let you.

Leave your DIY PCs at home

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

This is a response to the eWeek editorial Bring DIY Systems to Work. Nice theory. Unfortunately, lab theory and the real world don’t always mesh.

I like building PCs. I built my first PC in early 1994, back when everything was on a separate card and you had to set interrupts and DMA channels using jumpers and DIP switches and in most cases you had to tell the BIOS exactly what size drive was in it–it wouldn’t detect anything for you. I built my main PC at home myself. I built my secondary and tertiary PCs at home myself too. And my girlfriend’s PC, and my mom’s PC, and my sister’s PC.

Get the idea?

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A few short tips on buying laptops

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

A client came into my cube today seeking advice on laptops. He asked lots of good questions, so I thought I’d share the answers with you.National chains versus local: If you’re staying local, you might get better service from a local shop. In his case, he’s sending a daughter off to college out of state. Better to buy from someone who has a store close to the college.

Recommended brands: Buy what the college recommends, if possible. Why? The college’s technicians are used to working on that equipment and know its quirks and how to get around them. When I was working at Mizzou, we were used to IBMs. When people brought us Dells, sometimes we had problems getting them working. And yes, all laptops have quirks. They’re crankier than desktops.

Extended warranties: As a rule I don’t buy them on electronics equipment. My philosophy is that since I fix computers for a living, I am an extended warranty. Laptops are different. You probably do want the extended warranty because I can almost guarantee something’s going to break a short time after the manufacturer’s warranty goes out.

But here’s a secret. Don’t buy the extended warranty from the salesperson. March up to customer service and ask them about the terms. Get them to go over the fine print with you. Wait in line if you have to. The reason is simple. At least one national chain, whose name I won’t name, has a tendency to tell the salespeople one thing and the customer service people another. Maybe the salesperson says the no-lemon clause kicks in after it breaks three times and the customer service rep says four. Guess who’s word counts? Customer service.

You might also get the name and employee number of the person who tells you the terms of the agreement. It’s a lot of extra work, but it’s probably worth it to protect a $1,500 laptop. When I had a piece of equipment die for the third time a day before the extended warranty expired, I had to fight to get it replaced. In the end, I had to go to a different store with a more agreeable manager.

Cheap laptops: As a general rule I don’t think I trust sub-$1,000 laptops. Too many compromises. Sotec of Japan tried to sell a dirt-cheap laptop a few years ago. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who come here looking for advice on it. For the most part it was a good laptop, but it seems it had a few annoying issues.

Really, the sweet spot tends to be $1,500-$3,000. If you’re paying for it, aim for $1,500. If your employer is paying for it, aim for $3,000 since most companies have a 3-year replacement cycle no matter what the machine originally cost, and in three years the $3,000 laptop will annoy you less.

Used laptops: Don’t do it. People who buy laptops almost always use them until the wheels fall off and won’t go back on again. You might get lucky and get an off-lease laptop from an executive who used it as a status symbol and only powered the thing on twice, but more likely than not, when you buy a used laptop, you’re buying someone else’s problem.

Munich\’s unexpected migration costs prove nothing so far

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , ,

I saw an article in the Toronto Star in which Steve Ballmer was, um, well, talking gleefully about the city of Munich’s highly publicized and controversial migration to Linux, server to desktop, costing more money than expected.

So I suppose Mr. Ballmer is prepared to reimburse one of my clients for its unexpected expenses in migrating from VMS to Windows then, eh?

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Buy, don\’t build, enterprise servers

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

Steve sent me some questionable advice he found online–basically, someone advocating that you build your high-end servers rather than buying them, but admitting that it’s difficult for someone to build a $20,000 server and still be able to afford to maintain the thing.

There’s a solution: Buy it.This is the opposite of the best advice for desktops (although I increasingly tell people to just buy their computers because you don’t really save any money by building), but there are lots of very good reasons for it.

First and foremost is maintainability. The last time something went wrong with one of the HP servers at work, an LED on the front case came on before the problem became critical. Pop open the case, and an internal LED next to the failing component is lit up. Does your off-the-shelf motherboard have that feature? It may or it may not.

How does hot-spare memory sound? It’s kind of like RAID. You buy identical DIMMs to put in the system, but you buy one extra one, which goes into a specially designated slot. When a DIMM starts to fail, the system switches over to the hot spare. In the case of the mid-range HP servers, you can even open the case up, remove the failing module, and replace it, without powering down.

Of course you want your server to have RAID, and use hot-pluggable drives, so a failed disk doesn’t mean downtime. All but the very cheapest commercially-built servers have that feature from the factory.

But if you really have a budget of $20,000 per server, you shouldn’t even mess around with local storage. Buy some kind of a Storage Area Network instead. Basically, it’s a large bank of disks that connects to any number of servers. Some use a Fibre Channel connection, while others just use an Ethernet connection. Then you buy disks, slap them in the SAN, and configure the SAN to split the storage up between the servers. Ever run into a situation where you need 40 gigs of storage, and one server has 10 gigs free and one has 30 gigs free, but there isn’t much of anything you can move around to consolidate that free space? The SAN eliminates that. You can add one monster 300-gig disk to an array and split that storage up however you want. And one hot spare protects the entire array–no more need to buy one hot spare for every server on your network. On a big network (40 servers), that alone can pay for the SAN.

Finally, as far as spare parts go, a company ought to keep a couple of spare hard drives around for the times when a disk in a RAID array or SAN fails. But you put the servers on a maintenance agreement with someone like HP, IBM, or EDS, so that when anything else fails, that company comes out and replaces parts with its inventory. Outsource your server organ donor bank. You’ll save money, not just on the parts themselves, but also on physical storage space.

When I can get all of these features (except for the SAN) in an HP Proliant server that costs about $3,000, there’s no point in my employer wasting time building its own servers.

Make Linux look like Windows XP

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

I can’t say I discovered this–I saw a reference to it in User Friendly this past week–but there’s now an XP-lookalike window manager for Linux called XPDE.

A quick look at the screenshots shows it’s a pretty convincing clone. But is it legal?The authors maintain its legality, because it uses no Microsoft code, mentions no Microsoft trademarks, and uses no Microsoft icons. I wish them well, but there is precedent for a copyright infringement anyway.

Some 20 years ago, the best-selling spreadsheet (and perhaps best-known piece of software in the world) was Lotus 1-2-3. It was expensive. In 1985, microcomputer pioneer Adam Osborne began predicting the emergence of Lotus 1-2-3 clones priced under $100. The theory was, if one could clone the IBM PC and undercut IBM’s price, why couldn’t the same technique be used to clone expensive software and undercut it in price as well?

Osborne had insider knowledge, being the president of his own software company. He released a Lotus 1-2-3 clone himself, and in 1987, Lotus sued him. Borland also incorporated Lotus 1-2-3’s menu structure into its own spreadsheet product, Quattro Pro. Lotus won its case against Osborne’s Paperback Software, with a court finding Paperback in violation of Lotus’ copyright, and Osborne disappeared into obscurity in disgust. Borland was more successful, winning its case against Lotus on appeal. But it took six years to do it, during which both companies’ products were eclipsed in the marketplace by Microsoft Excel.

So while XPDE may technically be legal, if I were involved in the project, I would be afraid of being litigated into oblivion.

But in the meantime, if you want or need a Windows-like interface for your Linux box, you can download XPDE.