Personally, I use microsoft security essentials as my primary antivirus software, and the free version of malwarebytes for occasional scans. Combined, I get fairly decent antivirus protection for free. What are your preferences?

SSD's in my opinion are far better than HDDs. I couldn't imagine computing without one now, myself. But they both have disadvantages and advantages.

HDD - potentially longer life, cost effective, more storage than SSDs. Often slow, have more errors than SSDs, often needs maintenance (defragging, etc)
SSD - Extremely fast, no maintenance, less errors. Very expensive for the amount of storage, intensive R/W operations can wear it out quickly.

Which do you prefer?

This has become a pretty prominant question for american politics in recent years. Should minimum wage be raised?

Some argue that being paid minimum wage barely gives you anything to live by, and is basically an insult to employees. Others argue that if a business cannot afford to give  higher wages, a job on minimum wage is better than no job at all. What are your thoughts?

I'm actually running from a 5400 RPM hard drive on a desktop. (Nope, that's no typo. ) It's a 1TB drive, and it is almost as fast as my 7200 RPM 750GB drive. It appears that the higher data densities make up for the slower RPM rate.

Of course, 10000 RPM drives can't store nearly as much data, and thus have lower data densities. I guess my main thought is, what's the actual improvement of using a 10000 RPM drive if the latest 3TB drives are almost as fast, thanks to the higher data densities. They may have a very slight improvement, but is it really worth the extra price per GB?

Also, while it used to be that 5400 RPM drives were the norm, even for desktops, it seems nowadays that 7200 RPM will remain the standard, at least for a few more years. I can't really imagine desktops needing 10TB hard drives at this point, so do you think that a progression towards 10000 RPM drives will be occurring over the coming years?

Be sure to share your thoughts.

The more recent version of Windows have required large amounts of storage space. It is currently 16GB for the latest version of Windows. Linux, by comparison, will usually run very well on 4GB, at least for most distributions.

Does anyone else think 16GB is a bit much for a clean install?

Personally, mine tends to be very inconsistent, but I tend to average 1-2mbps download speeds nowadays. It has thankfully been improving lately, considering I used to get around 0.6mbps just two weeks ago. Perhaps the cable company is making some upgrades.

What are yours?

Everyone loves music, what kind do you like? How do you get your music?

I like rock, pop, and some rap. I use a service called Rdio ( http://rdio.com ) for my music. It was created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the guys behind Skype. You get 10 hours of music a month for free, but if you would like no ads and access from your mobile phone/tablet, it's $9.99 a month with no song purchasing fees. I use it mainly because I cannot afford 99 cents a pop but $10 I can do.

What were the specifications of your first computer?

My first had a 500mhz PIII, 128MB of RAM, windows 98, and 7GB of hard drive space. I soon got a new one with a 40GB hard drive, 256MB of RAM, and 450MHZ PIII (soon upgraded to 600MHZ) and an old install of ubuntu.

What were the specifications of your first computer?

Pretty self-explanatory. How many hours do you spend playing games of any kind daily? Be sure to vote in the poll!

As I've said before, I'm using Xfce D/E. But in the category of window managers, I like OpenBox (I've considered using CrunchBang Linux before) and ratpoison. What do you use? And you had better not say unity