Niall, I concur with what you say. It is absolutely possible to have a performant and stable Oracle environment on windows. However, I still prefer to use linux instead (or solaris as a second choice). The reason for this is that, when you have a problem with a process or installation or something, it is much easier to investigate on unix then on windows. For instance, most linux/unix sysadmins and even Oracle DBA's know how to do a system trace of a process and information about the system calls can easily be found. On windows you can also trace processes, but few windows admins know how to do this and information about it is hard to find. Another reason is that the unix / linux kernel is better instrumented then windows, giving you more real time information (eg solaris dtrace). Regards, Freek D'Hooge Uptime Oracle Database Administrator email: freek.dhooge@xxxxxxxxx tel +32(0)3 451 23 82 http://www.uptime.be disclaimer: www.uptime.be/disclaimer -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l