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Well after some messing about with getting a successful Vista download, burning it to a DVD, and realizing that I had to (for some reason) run the install from a DVD-R/RW Drive, I got Vista installed. It's been up and running for about 2 hours thus far. This is not a super-technical report, just some of my first impressions. The computer specs: AMD 2.1 GHZ 512 DDR 80 GB IDE RADEON All in Wonder The install was 50 minutes and not the best dialogues (ie, Your computer is going to restart several times.) It basically had the combined goodies of Server 2003 and XP SP2. The interface theme couldn't be tweaked anymore than in XP. What the Pros are IMHO: They seemed not to install MSN MEssenger by default =-) Any system settings are protected by a locked-down screen and a dialogue box "Did you really mean to run that program?". Ideal for computer lemmings, there's no "Stop asking me." tick box. Office 2007 interface is tidied up and more simplistic for typical office admin tasks. It's much more intuitive to score a mail-merge with Word/Excel. Ideal for computer lemmings. The built-in Photo Viewer lets you scroll and zoom around, nifty. The built-in colloberative software seems like it is straight-forward to setup a private workspace on a LAN. I don't have any other clients to try this out with though. Windows Defender installed by default. Search box on the start button. Snipping Tool, lets you choose the portion of the screen to capture, instead of the prntscrn or ctrl+prntscrn. There is a side-bar with some gkrellm-like widgets you can play around with. Accessability has a few more options, like speech recognition. Macs have had this for how long though? The Cons IMHO: Slllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllloooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!! I'm having a full-on 2 minute boot time. Any app I open takes at least 15 seconds. Every now and then everything will sputter. Once an app is open they run at normal speed, but anything to do with settings drudges the system to a crawl. Bitlocker isn't setup by default. It scares me to think what effect this will have on an already diabolical performance. When I joined the domain, the profile doesn't roam correctly by default, there's no more Documents & Settings folder. They now have a "Users" folder. When I opened Media Center for the first time, it runs through a dialog asking one-off setup questions. I got as far as confirming I have an Always On connection when Media Center/Player must have wet itself because it crashed out with no error reporting. MS Access seems to only have online templates. MS Paint is still useless. BUT, the default save format is PNG! Simply dragging a scroll bar chows up 30% of my CPU, and 72% of RAM is used (that's what, like 375 megs?) It's the same ol' maintenance of running disk cleanup and defrag. Bleh. For the screen reader, you only get Anna the yank. That's a shame because programs like Clicker give very nice British voices. It is sllllllllowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. I wouldn't pay to have somebody sit through the lag Vista is giving this fairly high-spec test machine. If it ran at the speed of XP, it's definitely user friendly for uncle Jack the online gambler and Aunt Susie the eBay nut. Anybody else have a test with it yet? Kevin -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html