At work, they got me a Toshiba laptop about 6 months ago.  A nice, entry level machine.  It came with Vista Home and it took me about 27 minutes to realize that it really couldn't do what I needed to do, and the things it could do, it did very slowly.

It was difficult to find all the XP drivers I needed, but I finally got XP SP2 running just fine.  All things have been peachy for the last few months.  I got invited to the Micro$oft launch event for Server 2008, etc, and for attending, I got a copy of Vista Ultimate with SP1.  Hmmmm.

I did some research and discovered that many of the complaints I had about Vista had supposedly been addressed with the service pack.  So, maybe it was time to give it a second chance.

I debated as the whether just do an upgrade over XP, and hopefully save all my data, or do a clean install.  I decided to do a backup, do an upgrade, and if all went well, I could wipe and do a full, clean install later.  That is what I did.

The upgrade took about 2 1/2 hours, but seemed to go smoothly.  All my apps and data made it fine, and the system as a whole looks like it is running fine so far. (It have been 3 days now.)  No crashes, no freezes.  Actually no problems at all.  Some things still run a little slower, but in general, it is a much improved system than the Home version I started with.

One of the first things I did was to disable just about all the bells and whistles (like the sidebar) and uninstalled all the apps and services I think I could do without.  I have since reactivated the sidebar, it is actually pretty cool.  I haven't played with things like the animated backgrounds or other stuff, but it is running my work apps great, and the network setup was automatic and painless.  I have a lot more to learn, but so far I am changing my opinion of the operating system.

More later....I have a stack of old horse books I want to get added to the website soon.  Thanks for visiting.