"Cool!" That was my first reaction when an honest-to-garsh bash shell started on my Windows 2000 notebook. This is because I had just installed Cygwin on my notebook. Cygwin is basicallly two things: 1) cygwin1.dll which is a UNIX emulation layer and 2) a whole slew of kick-ass UNIX tools that were ported to the Windows platform. Now I have my gcc, bash, grep, awk, sed, vi, and even X11 on my Windows 2000 box and there is no need to reboot to Linux. I especially like the inclusion of an X-Server because now I don't have to pay for one (like XWin32. The Cygwin XFree86 even comes with fvwm if you wanna go old school. Or if you want cool, then there's KDE for Cygwin. So, it is a win-win situation here. Give it a try, the best thing is that it is free. The one drawback is that if you go all-out and do a full install, it's a 1.5GB download! But thank goodness you can pick and choose the stuff you want to install!