4. Reconciliation

Pah, who am I kidding - I'm too nice a guy to stay mad at anyone for long. One flip of that power button and a pristine copy of Windows XP boots up almost instantly. This is virgin computing territory, the place we all wish we could keep our computers forever; nothing done to screw anything up and cause the system to slow down. Sheer beauty.

That is, of course, except for a few niggles. First, I have to confess to hating Fisher Price Windows. The look and feel of it never went down well with me, a hardened Windows 2000 user by the time I was forced to make the switch to Windows-for-People-Who-Don't-Know-What-DOS-Is.

I'm starting to relieve my new notebook of all the crappy software it came with.

But apart from the looks, as a tech head, it really annoys me how stringently locked down so many of the administrative features are. I can't even get at the control panel without having to fiddle around with some options. What's more, the themes can suck up a lot of performance on a machine. While Redmond is sending frantic smoke signals up to warn us all about the 3D features of Vista, we all have to nod and say, "That's pretty... now, where can I turn it off?"

Honestly, having to traipse through the Services list to kill off half the useless processes on a system is a real bum. Here's to the day Microsoft releases a version of Windows with a rather simplistic and easy to get at option to turn off all the crap and make the OS what it looks like on most professionals machines.

Then there's all the crapola that Dell bundles with the machine. Power management I can live with, as it's actually quite handy. But "Media Centre Experience"? Listen you portentous little git, I'll use whatever I want in order to listen to my music and watch my DVD's. Now bugger off.