Software

Most of the popular browsers these days are based on one of the two open source rendering engines - khtml/WebKit and Gecko. The most popular browser, however, is based on proprietary technology: Internet Explorer. Even though IE made some progress during the past few years, it's no secret that it took Microsoft far too long to counter the success of Mozilla's Firefox.

One of the common problems when Windows Vista was released was that of missing or non-working drivers. Microsoft massively reworked many of Windows' internal systems and frameworks, meaning lots of drivers broke, with most of them needing major work, and some even needed to be rewritten completely. Apparently, Microsoft didn't communicate this well enough with its hardware partners - or the partners were lazy, who knows - because many devices failed to work with Vista during its early months of being out in the wild.

Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution. It includes a fully automated remote and local application installation system and a very versatile backup and restore system which may be used with any writable media including a hard drive, a floppy drive, or a USB device.