Quote - Well I'm through fighting with this OS I'm going to XP X64.  I just dont have the time or patience to redesign the whole OS to work, truthfully I'm plain disgusted with it.  If I could I'd go back to Win 98.  Someone mentioned Linux? Will Linux run Max, Zbrush and Poser? I am totally ready to give up on microsoft forever if I can find an alternative.  I have an old linux slackware I think or something like that, I think I have redhat too, theyre probably too old for this though.. I,m running a new Dell XPS core2 quad Q6600, and I especially want my Wacom intous 3 graphics tablet to work. How about linux/ Can it do what I want?

Well, it is possible to get Linux to run such apps, but if your lacking the time and patience to tune Vista to your needs I wouldn't recommend Linux.  Although I am a Linux fan myself, the power and speed are remarkable, the OS's biggest downfall is that you do have to do a lot of tuning and tweaking to get it working properly.

If your interested in trying LInux for the first time, I'd recommend you try a distribution like Ubuntu or Debian and setup a small partition on your drive for this purpose.  If you'd like to just "preview" LInux (or any other OS really) and see if it's worth actually getting into, you might want to try Virtual Box:

http://www.virtualbox.org/

You can install this under Windows and it setups a "virtual machine" that allows you to try out other OS's by installing them in a virtual enfironment that runs under windows.  This way you don't need to worry about dual booting, partitioning, or any of the other things that come with trying out a new os.  You can set it up as a "virtual machine" and test it out, see which distro is the one for you and go from there.  If you decide you like a certain brand of LInux you can always install a dual boot partition on your system at a later date, the virtual machine sort of allows you to try it out and see if it's of any interest without affecting any of the partitions on your harddrive.

I generally recommend either Debian or Ubuntu for most because both are built on the debian package system, it allows you to quickly and easily install a wide variety of software without jumping through a lot of hoops.  Instaling software on other Linux distributions can be a complicated and sometimes frustrating procedure.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...