Mike’s Musings

A suitable subtitle would probably be “And now for something completely different”. I’ve not done anything with PHP in a very long time. The good news is that the NetBeans 6.5 IDE provides support for development and debugging PHP applications.

A friend on my wanted to create an e-commerce web site to sell jewelry and gifts. After doing some research, I selected a web hosting company that included an easy to install shopping cart application written in PHP. The application was a slightly modified (perhaps just older?) version of osCommerce. It turns out that osCommerce is one of the leaders in this space and provides numerous features and community developed modifications that can be added. This also turned out to be a drawback.
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Are you one of the folks who upgraded to Microsoft Vista and now wish you had not? Don’t be too depressed, you are not alone. If the folks at PC Magazine feel compelled to write an article on how to “down grade” your Vista install to Windows XP, then I would imagine that the complaints have been heard.

PC Magazine has an article, How to Downgrade from Vista to XP, that is dated 04/04/2008. The article describes steps you can take to “down grade” your system to Windows XP. The article gives several reasons why you might consider this: 1) Vista is much slower, 2) Vista uses much more memory and 3) Windows Explorer crashes more in Vista.

Fortunately, I’m not among those suffering with Microsoft Vista. I managed to buy a recent laptop with Windows XP installed and plan to keep it that way until it dies. The primary system I use is Ubuntu, which has not crashed on me once, is faster than XP and uses less memory than XP (in my opinion).