It must be coming on six years ago that I took a deep breath and fired up my first Windows XP machine You see, I’m from Norfolk and we fear change.

I’ve probably used every flavour of Windows way back to Windows 3.0 which went onto good old 286 machines with a couple of floppy disks. I still have a couple of machines that run 98 and Me - they’re doing what they need to and wouldn’t support anything higher, so why bother upgrading?

I’ve always thought Windows a bit frivolous, but as the power of modern machines increases exponentially, I think even these spangly 3d transparent gui interfaces have a hard job using up all available resource, and being one who uses a machine for far too much of the working day, I wouldn’t be without it now. I’m not a good enough typist to survive with a command line interface alone, but I like to think I still could if I needed to (I’m proud to say I use vi regularly!)

I won’t get into the Windows vs. Mac debate, or even Windows vs. Linux - suffice it to say I’ve spent time on most modern desktop environments, and given the choice I still revert to Windows. Servers, well that’s a different matter…

Back to the main story - It was about time to get myself a new working environment, so once again I took a deep breath, and this time volunteered to move into modern times and chose a machine with Windows Vista Business installed.

For reference I’ve been a big fan of XP since that day six years ago - although I will point out that the first thing I do is switch the theme to ‘classic’. I’ve had my share of blue screens, but on the whole I’ve found it as bearable as you could hope for, and I’ve never really hankered for anything else.

So I’ve been using Vista for a few days now… and I’m pleased to report that I’ve had no major issues. I’ve not had to hit F1 yet or otherwise ask for help - everything seems fairly familiar and intuitive. I think I’m a fan of the new interface to Windows Explorer, which from recollection of how OS-X does it seems more like Finder than the old XP Explorer - a crumbtrail instead of an address bar allows you to jump back several levels at a single click.

I’m currently finding it a bit hard to navigate around networks though - ‘My Network Places’ seems to have subtly chaged and it’s catching me out. Similarly, ‘My Documents’ has morphed into just ‘Documents’ - these are just little navigation niggles I’m sure I’ll adjust to as time progresses.

So far I’ve stuck with the default Aero theme, and I’m faintly amused by the ‘glass’ effect, but might try switching back to classic just to be stubborn. And I’m not overly bitten by the widget bug yet, although I do like the big analogue clock on the Desktop.

Here’s hoping I end up as happy with Vista as I have been with XP - I suppose I can always downgrade if I have to.