Im a win user and trying to find a better OS, i was wondering if Beos is free or do i have to pay an arm and a leg to get it. Also is it able almost do the same thing like windows except crash?? I wake up at 6 o'clock every morning, no matter what time it is.

BeOS is an entirely modern,designed with high end internet and multimedia capabilities from the ground up,OS, and it was even up aginst FreeBSD (Unix) as the potential new apple OS (they went with freeBSD finally, and part of the reason surely was that BSD unix could be integrated into a new GUI front end, whereas BeOS was, for all intents and purposes, already complete, a finished OS)..Due to it's advanced kernel and totally multithreaded design, if it did crash it would only be the defective application itself that would crash, the rest of the OS goes on just as well as it ever did .. Due to , essentially, just a lot of bad luck, BeOS went under financially, but the OS was picked up by Palm, and they allowed it to be distributed free, which is still the case..if you go to Bebits.com, there you can get a free download for BeOS 5 for the PC (several different versions, actually, but the most popular one is Personal Edition (PE), which can actually be installed throgh windows,and run as a virtual file..or, you can also install it to a dedicated drive as the only OS, if you so choose... Enough info? Go to Bebits1

Sounds awesome, ill give it a try, thz. Pretty much, ill give it a try and c what its like. I wake up at 6 o'clock every morning, no matter what time it is.

If you download the PE version, which was freely distributed by Be Inc., it has to be installed within Windows to begin with. Download and istall whatever software, patches, and drivers you need. Then run the application "Installer" and you can install BeOS from the Windows partition to any other partition - any software, patches, and user settings will be installed too! BeOS re-installs easily to any partition, Primary or Logical, on either a Slave or Primary drive. Easiest OS to install ever! Don't forget to download and install the free 5.01 and 5.03 upgrade packages too! You might also look into the Max and Dev editions of BeOS. They are based on the free PE version, but are independant distributions and can be installed directly from a CD. They have many software applications, patches, and drivers included. Here are some sites for more info: Frizbe.net - check for hardware compatibility BeBits and BeZip - BeOS freeware BeTips.net - tons of FAQs Best Luck, Bob

Try ebay. You can likely get the full professional edition there cheaply. I agree with everyone else. It is the easiest to install. At one point I even re-partitioned a drive with it, creating 4 partitions, Win, Linux Swap, Linux and BeOS. On a couple of occasions this OS and the utilities it includes got me out of jams. There are community efforts to re-create the OS and bring it back to life. Hope it comes back, because in my opinion it had more appeal for the ordinary (non-techie, like me) consumer than Linux.