Im thinking about BeOs but i need to know a few things the first is can i install it and keep windows easily? Second is it easy or hard or easy once you get used to it... and third could you tell me some of the things that make it better than windows. Thank you in advance

Question 1: It depends which version you install. If you install Personal Edition you can actually install it to your Windows drive and reboot into it (note it will not work with XP) If you install Max edition (bebits.com) or the Professional edition, you will need to resize your Windows partition and install BeOS onto the space left over (Partition Magic will be your best solution to SAFELY resize your disk). Question 2: Anything is easy once you get used to it, I think you meant to ask if it is easy to get used to in which case it was for me at least. Question 3: BeOS is already better than Windows in many ways (like speed, not crashing, etc). It was built to be a media OS. It is not better than Windows however in that is has a LOT less software available. Some extra things to note: BeOS was bought by Palm in either 2000 or 2001 and DISCONTINUED. This means any hardware that came out since will only work if you can find drivers are bebits.com. You may want to wait until YellowTab's Zeta comes out (they bought code and licenses BeOS as they were working on R6 and are basically continuing it (Palm owns R5 and before now I'm guessing that was what was arranged)) that is unless you have a fully compatible system. Also, a note for anyone new trying to run an alternative system, an OS runs software written for it, NOT other systems (BeOS will NOT run Windows software, Windows will not run BeOS software, and is the same with all other systems like linux, Mac OS, BSD, etc (with the exception of emulators)) Good luck!

As above. Post hardware info and we might be able to say. There are versions of Live CD that could test your system roughly. Not all apps work.(all CDs are very slooow so it will not run close to fast) I like it because it is still pretty fast to boot and I don't worry about virus's and worms as much.

Well..windows has the advantage simply because there's sooo many copies out there and sooo many people using it..that naturally, theres gonna be way more software for it..however, there's still quite a bit of BeOS software (especially for intel) and keep in mind that theres really not that many different kinds of apps anyways, so where you might find a hundred different media players for BeOS,for instance, theres tens of thousands for windows..but remember, more quantity doesn't imply better quality, just more programmers :) The original intent at Be wasn't to try and replace windows, but to co-exist comfortably alongside it, so it keeps your windows partition safe during install, and allows you to boot between them after... It's worth noting that it wan't discontinued because of any issues with the OS, but due to severe financial difficulties within Be, inc. (not gonna start pointing any fingers..if you want to know, it's easy to find out the story from various Be sites).. It is also, as pointed out previously, still being actively developed as Zeta, so it's not dead yet either.... As far as 'easy to use', yeah sure,didn't take me long, really..it's pretty straightforward... but also (as a musician) i've switched to digital only recording..and i'm pretty sure at this point that I wouldn't use anything else for it now, even if it were hard to use...the video and audio quality is exceptional and very very stable.....

BeOS works very well alongside Windows2000 for me. I dualboot with an 10GB BFS partition and BeOS PE Developer Edition. That's an *unofficial* R5 PE distribution. You can simply use Bootman boot manager to select your OS at boottime (it's offered by BeOS installer after the successful install). You have to be careful if you have an AMD CPU, though. For me, there were no problems since Developer Edition BeOS installer already offers an option to install AMD patched kernel. An unpatched, original BeOS PE won't run on my AMD system. Aditionally, no BeOS version will boot on my system with the multi-processor support enabled. You can disable that during boot time and also permanently. Other than that BeOS is great! It is a very easy system for use, with much less to know as with GNU/Linux or even Windows. It boots fast, and coexist with other OS quite well. For instance, there are file system add-ons for FAT, NTFS (R/O) and ext2 (R/O). Im thinking about BeOs but i need to know a few things the first is can i install it and keep windows easily? Second is it easy or hard or easy once you get used to it... and third could you tell me some of the things that make it better than windows. Thank you in advance Matt