Thanks for the Firefox tip, I will try it out. We use both IE and Firefox browsers.
The work I used to do about nine years ago was Oracle datatbases on unix/Solaris. Running on Sun servers, it was very stable, >99.95%, and very fast. I have also tended Oracle on an IBM mini running a derivative of At&T Unix, that was back in the mid 1990's
It was also very stable and amazingly fast given the hardware it was running on. As of ~2000, any flavor of Linux wasn't a good choice for large commercial operations, except the IBM adapted version running on their mainframes. Doesn't sound like a lot has changed for the environment you are in.
My wife has had good results with linux in a school environment where the complexities and performance pressures are much lower. They adopted it when MS licences just became too expensive to justify in a school. She says now MS Office and Windows costs around $75 per year per desktop with 'university site' pricing.
I think you can get a lot done cheaply with an open source type of distribution under the right conditions such as a prototype system or some kinds of development environments. Or the uses you described above. If you are brave, talented and the risk warrants it, you can do much more.
I have never worked on SQLServer. Looked at it a couple times but couldn't locate the OS command line or the vi editor
My point is that you pay well for MS products, they portray themselves as playing in the commercial enterprise zone, yet their software is a lot less stable than what I worked with 10 years ago when compared to Solaris or Oracle. And those were multi-user systems. The Solaris system peaked at around 4000 concurrent users and usually had about 2500 concurrent users.
IE tells me it has to 'recover' the program at least every other day. That's an improvement over BSofD, but not what I would call great software. If a*nix variant desktop suite can even come close to giving them a run for their money, that says something. Without *nix breathing on their necks, MS products probably would be worse than they are.
Well, that's all in the past for me. Can't say I really miss it either.
Dave.