buying the kids a new computer...

[Tom]

Indeed. if its an older app it might be in "Program Files" some place, or wherever you installed the app.

[Mr. Analog]

Get 'em an Apple ][ and tell them to make their own fun with it (j/k of course).

I let my brother have my old Atari ST, complete with about 3 dozen games (mostly European, yeah baby! Those were the days of creativity!) ...included was the "GFA BASIC" programming tool (like a BASIC+Pascal hybrid, no line numbers, has While...Wend and Do..Until loops, etc.) and his 12 year old son apparently has been playing around with it on occasion

Now that is freakin' cool man. All the basics are there and the output is tangible.

I'm seriously considering getting my son an HTML book to start with (he's interested in creating web sites).

Anyway, let us know if/when you pick a computer

Ehhh, if you want I have a pretty good HTML 4 book kicking around. It's got examples and stuff and I think it even has a CD in it.

[Thorin]

On a side note...

One of my coworkers is a non-technical person who will be doing testing for us.  She has Vista installed.  She lives in another province.  Her software couldn't find the database, so I wanted to see if she could ping.  So I told her to click Start and then Run.

"Sorry, I don't see that".  Whut?!  Grr!  Lets go hunting for the Command Window shortcut...  We ended up finding it by typing "cmd" in the Search box on the Start menu, and then having to right-click and choose Run As Administrator.  Yeah, that'll keep dumb users from installing trojans!

Later on in the session I want to see if she can telnet to the server on a particular port.  So I tell her to type "telnet <erver> <port>" in her Command Window.

"It says telnet is not a supported command".  Whut-wuht?!  Grr!  Telnet is not a part of Vista Home (dunno about Vista Business).  Cuz, y'know, taking away tools we're used to having is a good idea!

Anyway, Vista will be fine for you, it won't bother you at all.  Honest.  It's a great improvement over XP and the user experience is way better and if we didn't tell you it was Vista you wouldn't even know!  It's that good!

Also, Windows really works better if you only have a single partition (C:) not multiple (C:, D:, etc).

[Lazybones]

- You can reenable telnet on Vista http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2050/vista_install_enable_telnet_client_server/ like many other services and things they dissable ways for novice users to hurt them selves.. TELNET isn't exactly secure passing everyting plain text passwords and all.

- TIP type CMD in search it will be the first selected hit, use CTRL+SHIFT+Enter this will lauch CMD with admin rights (after the UAC warning)

- 32bit apps generally all work under vista just fine, 16bit is a no go (clutching some legacy console tools?)

- Again imaging your current machine and transfering it into a VM will give you everything you have now till you finnish customizing the host vista install.

- you can't upgrade from XP to VISTA or 7 they are too different and require clean installs you can however upgrade from Vista to 7 just fine.