Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest Xandros. The Open Circulation Edition is older, but it's got the heritage of Corel Linux. Honestly, it's the only distro that just worked right out of the box. It would be a really good intro to Linux for anyone, particularly for your sister.
This is also their downfall, with such ease of use, also comes great vulnerability. When a script on a website can cause damage to your operating system, someone might want to rethink the design of the OS. Microsoft is the epitome of making it work, making it work easily, and making it work...
Install Windows XP Professional over Windows XP Home, settings will be preserved. Of course the Domain profile will be new, so you'll have to back that up and then restore it.
Linux doesn't run the Internet, Cisco does. Just because Apache is the most popular webserver doesn't mean it's all running on Linux. Apache can run on Solaris, Windows, FreeBSD, Irix, lots of operating systems.
Actually, I always find it a good thing to have two GC servers, so that if one goes down, people can still login. The only time it causes load problems is when there are scads of directory objects. As for an upgrade, I hate them, but they do occasionally work. 2003 is actually quite good at...
I've got two machines cvsup'ed already, ready to buildworld and kernel. I'm eager to see the SMP improvements they've made.
Remember, FreeBSD will get you laid, OpenBSD won't let you get laid without a condom, NetBSD will make you try 23 positions, and Linux will leave you sad and lonely.
It would be faster to compress the whole directory into one file, then copy that one file over. Copying lots of little files over will slow down any transfer, regardless of the operating system.
Until it breaks, then you'll be in hell. Not to thread crap, but I ran away from ArcServe a few years ago, never felt better about a decision. BackupExec is my current choice.
I dual boot FreeBSD 5.4 and Windows 2000 right now, but I don't think I've booted up into Windows in weeks. FreeBSD does everything. I recommend getting used to it, then pick up a copy of BSD Hacks, that book is amazing for tips and ideas.
I know that, I just wanted to point out that it looks like the source tree has been tagged as 5.4-RELEASE, and if you want to cvsup now, you can. This is my personal workstation at home, I'm not moving any production machines to any release until the say-so hits the FreeBSD Announce mailing list.