As I mentioned, I use Vista (on the laptop I remote desktop into XP) and it is a nightmare. I practically do nothing on it other than rd and browse the web, yet it’s managed to get completely clogged up (running out of drive space on C), and even more annoyingly the hdd goes crazy every now and again, the system grinding to a halt - forget about even streaming anything. The HDD itself is fine. It’s usually some svchost.exe process or similar, apparently deciding to defrag the hard drive or something at random!

Automatic Updates on XP used to cause me a similar headache when it would periodically evaluate the system for updates, causing the system to halt for a few minutes. The only solution was to disable the Automatic Updates service and run it on my time. (Fully automatic updating, which apparently runs at a time specified by you, e.g. 3 am, was not an option for me because it would download and install updates for Office components I don’t even have installed - yes that is MS logic for you.) At least on XP you can easily delete the update uninstallers and download backups (I’m not sure why it doesn’t at least remove these itself). My conspiracy theory is that MS clogs up systems on purpose so that users feel they need to upgrade. But I was able to watch video fine in 2004, and before, so why not now? I’m not playing the latest computer games or anything like that.

Apologies for my ranting.

I think I will eventually upgrade to Win7. I’ve heard it’s much better than Vista. 8 apparently is not being recommended to businesses by the big IT consultancy firms (not worth the effort they say).