I have been warned by the local authorities that with the holiday season there are a lot of reports of laptops and gear bags being stolen from the trunks of cars. This has always been a problem but I’m told it’s getting much worse with the holiday season getting thieves anxious to get their hands on your gear. The rash of thefts are occuring during the lunch hour at popular restaurants. The innovative thieves are using electronic trunk openers they can get on the Internet and they walk around the parking lot popping the opener until something opens. A lot of professionals leave their briefcases and gear bags in the trunk of the car and these bad guys are getting them by simply pushing a button. Authorities are strongly encouraging us to not leave our gear in the car- take it in with you to keep it safe.

That’s my public service announcement for the day.

Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (”WinFLP”) is an operating system from Microsoft, based on Windows XP, but optimized for older, less powerful hardware. It was released on July 8, 2006.

Wow, I guess I had never heard of this…

A stripped down version of Windows XP from Microsoft.
No OEM Version and No Retail Version.
Just sold to Enterprises to manage upgrading old systems to new software.
A computer with 233 megahertz or higher processor clock speed.
64 MB of RAM. 256 MB of RAM is recommended.
610 MB Hard drive space

In addition to giving better performance on older machines, the reduced number of files increases boot speed, and the reduced number of services also improves security, and responsiveness. People with old hardware unable to run an updated version of Windows XP usefully (and who therefore have been using an un-updated version of Windows) have the opportunity to use Windows without the security issues which come with using an operating system without the latest security fixes.

Interesting. Now I’ll have to build another spare parts pc!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Fundamentals_for_Legacy_PCs