I am currently working on a customer's Windows Vista HP laptop. Although I myself have a Vista 64 machine it is a fairly super-tweaked, hyper personalised multi-screen PC that simply works and virtually never gives me any headaches. As an apology, I really do not have the time or indeed the will to upgrade it to Win 7, and in fact I don't really think of it as a Vista PC (except for the dialog annoyances that they removed in Win 7). If and when it suddenly breaks down I'll just replace it with a good Windows 7 PC. But every other PC in the house is either Windows 7 or Linux (apart from the mothballed iMac).

With this Vista 32 laptop I am back to the feeling of loathing I felt for Vista all those years ago when all I saw entering the workshop was new Vista PCs and laptops that had nothing but problems and were supremely underpowered. This customer handed me the laptop to repair because it was crushingly slow and much of that was caused by malware infestation. Having done everything possible to this laptop including using every tool at my disposal to remove anything that could be interfering with the normal operation of Windows, I observe that it is still slow as a drunken sea slug. The laptop has just 1Gb of RAM which be rectified as soon as poss, but other than that the only thing I can recommend to the client is an upgrade to Win 7.

I shouldn't complain, Windows Vista has been and continues to be a source of income for me. But, my reason for posting: do you remember when your main computing power came from a Vista-powered PC? Does that period in your life still give you nightmares? Are you still (like me incidentally) using Vista?