Things that force me to keep windows installed (not all MS products, but in a sense require you to have windows):
1) Powerpoint - Impress can't even import many powerpoint presentations correctly, and offers far less pre-made themes,. and is overall very weak competitively. (In general, the entire Office suite wins over the alternatives; the powerpoint/impress difference though really stands out).
2) Games. - You can't play 95+% of FPSs on linux.
3) Laptops seem to work better with Win7 than Linux (Kubuntu), in terms of input/out (I'm using a Dell). The linux touchpad drivers are lacking TouchCheck, so accidental tapping while typing is a huge issue. Plugging into an external monitor is not automatic.
2) Wow, I had no idea so many were gold rated. Now if only they could get office working, I'd never have to use windows again on my desktop. :)
3) Are there any laptops with such features that work very well with Linux?
4) What distro to you use? Both of my computers have issues where the full screen window appears behind the browser (and switching back to windowed mode fails) - I'm on kubuntu 10.04.
4) I've never seen that problem on Gnome - which I use daily with both Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13. Sounds like that's a problem with KDE.
Edit: actually, I've seen similar problems with Flash on Linux in 64-bit. It should be noted that the version of Flash for 64-bit Linux is atrocious at the moment; the 32-bit is far superior. Don't know if that's your trouble.
1) Powerpoint - Impress can't even import many powerpoint presentations correctly, and offers far less pre-made themes,. and is overall very weak competitively. (In general, the entire Office suite wins over the alternatives; the powerpoint/impress difference though really stands out).
2) Games. - You can't play 95+% of FPSs on linux.
3) Laptops seem to work better with Win7 than Linux (Kubuntu), in terms of input/out (I'm using a Dell). The linux touchpad drivers are lacking TouchCheck, so accidental tapping while typing is a huge issue. Plugging into an external monitor is not automatic.
4) Full-screen flash remains screwy on linux.