Windows 7

[yello]

My partner has Vista on her laptop and I can see NO benefit to her or me from the changes over XP.

I'd agree with that. I stuck with Win2k for quite a while before going to Unix, but used XP at (then) work. Vista was on my wife's laptop when she bought it but the performance was shocking. It was a better spec machine than my old Win2k laptop but slower, much slower. Lord only knows what Vista was doing but it was certainly going about it the long way. To me, it seemed only to look different; as if MS had put a 'seamless integration' layer over the top of what was already there in XP and slowed the whole damned thing down.

Does Linux run old Windows 98 progams though?

I run Windows programs (Garmin Training Centre, Cyclistats, SportsTracks and MotionBased Garmin upload agent) on my Ubuntu laptop in what's called a 'virtual environment'. That's a bit of software (in my case VirtualBox, but there are others) that allocates itself a section of hard disk and allows you to load another OS (in my case Win2k) into that area.

I like VirtualBox (mainly because it's free!) but also because it allows both the Ubuntu environment and the Win2k environment to see each other as if they were 2 machines on the same networe. So you can file share, drag and drop etc, across the 2 OSs.

You can also configure USB devices etc in the Windows environment (so using the correct proprietary drivers) and have them work there even though your Unix environment might not be able to do anything/much with them. Very neat.

 

[hackbike 666]

Thanks for the answers.I loaded a Vista version last night via virtual pc but it didnt work due to the key expiring.I may try a Vista 3rd Generation in future.

 

[Batzman]

I like it.

The only significant issue I've had is that I can't resume from suspend.

It runs pretty well on my 2005 vintage machine (although Vista ran fine on this machine as well) - resource use seems to be pretty similar.

You can finally run as a limited user without significant problems, which should be a good thing from a security perspective.
Annoying stuff that has bugged me from XP has finally been fixed (you can control the volume of individual apps for instance).
The whole desktop doesn't lock up if you lose access to a network share
I like the instant search thingy in the start menu.
Libraries are a cool idea (it has one 'folder' that you can add all of your photo folders to, and you'll then have one place for picture management) - the same for documents
The taskbar is fairly similar to the Mac one now. I like how you can hover over the icons in the task bar and see previews of the window's content.

IE8 is a bit dodgy, but I think there is a newer beta for that. I use Chrome which needed some tweaks to get running.

I like the fact that those system tray icons near the clock on older versions of windows get their own area and don't really nag you any more.

Java works fine.

It includes PowerShell as standard (yay!)