Vista

There seemed to be a lot of criticism aimed at M$ Vista o/s, with techie users saying they preferred XP (if they had to use Windoze!), but I have not found any problems with the system. From activation of pre-installed version on my laptop, it's been easy to make adjustment from XP, and the interface appears to work somewhat better than XP, certainly with its start-up cycle. Downloading service pack 1 - for my Vista laptop, was less troublesome and worrying than adding service pack 3 to my XP desktop.

Bells and whistles stuff that's new for Vista, include significant practical things like ReadyBoost, which uses plug-in flash drive (up to 4 GB) as extra memory for RAM or disk cache, and hard drive defrag that runs in the background when computer is idle. There's also fun items like a free chess program (yes, I beat the machine at its lowest setting!) in the games section.