I'm running cygwin, and it's definitely one of the rquired things to makes Win2K usable. Somehow, though, it's not the same. I just really want to dump Win2K altogether. I'm sick of the random inexplicable crashes. I'm sick of one program slamming the CPU and all the others being unresponsive. (I'm particularly sick of Canon's ImageBrowser software which reprioritizes itself to be "Above Normal", which especially kills system response time.) It's time to use a real OS. It's just those damn applications...

(Favorite recent example of an inexplicable crash: In the background, my home machine was grinding away running Lame to make some MP3 files, under the control of EAC. Meanwhile, I'm working in PowerPoint. Three minutes into dorking with PowerPoint, *boom*, blue screen of death and reboot before I can read the text. Get everything back up again, restart EAC, restart PowerPoint, and three minutes later, *boom*. Next time, I forgot about EAC and just ran PowerPoint and it all worked fine. Note that EAC was done ripping. It was just running Lame in the background. If an OS isn't stable enough to handle a single heavy CPU load plus interactive apps, then something's wrong.)