Stability-wise, Vista is much worse than XP with all its bandages. Security fixes continue to be applied to Vista - I had a total of 15 applied during my brief period of usage - but the stability leaves much to be desired. Each and every time a security fix was applied, I had to reboot the machine.

There are times when the whole system seems to seize up for no apparent reason; at others, it seems to take forever for a simple function to be performed. Is 2 gig of memory then too little? Sounds crazy when you consider that Vista is produced by a company whose joint founder Bill Gates once decreed that nobody would ever need more than 640k of RAM!

There is constant disk activity and it would appear that this is happening for the purpose of indexing in order to make desktop search faster; at the rate the disk is written to, I would suspect that its lifetime will be seriously reduced. I did a few tweaks to reduce the activity as I need this machine to test other software down the road.

I had a look at the Windows Media Centre and tried to make a CD but gave up after a while; the interface is clunky, non-intuitive and anything but user-friendly. I needed to make the CD in a hurry so I used my son's MacBook - something I am rarely allowed to touch, as he is highly possessive about it - and figured out how to make the disc in a matter of minutes. It was the first time I had used the MacBook for that purpose.

In all, I had to download about 200 meg of software just to make Vista usable - and a word processor wasn't among the lot. No, you need to get in AdAware, Spybot, WinZip (or WinRar), Adobe Reader, a Torrent client, an SCP client (I could only find a trial version), QuickTime player, VLC media player and a few browsers. Vista had no drivers for my monitor (a 22-inch flat screen) or my printer (a Samsung SCX-4200).

The funny thing is, Vista would not recognise the printer even though the manufacturer has supplied drivers specifically for the O-S; it is a unique printer in that it comes with drivers for Windows, Linux and the Mac! But Vista doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

The same printer works fine with my daughter's XP laptop and my son's MacBook. Life is full of such imponderables.

When it comes to media files, Windows Media Player wants to hog the show. Now I wouldn't have minded if the app can handle all media types. Such, sadly, is not the case. I downloaded an MP4 of a rugby game (it was shown on ABC 2, the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster) but all I could get out of Media Player was sound. (I copied the file over to my Debian AMD64 box and watched it - excellent stuff, both in terms of video quality and the game itself). Interesting to note that neither VLC media player nor QuickTime could play the video stream on Vista either.

A similar thing happened with an .avi file; Media Player indicated that the proper codec had been downloaded but once again there was only sound, no vision. Once that file was on my Debian box it played without any problem.