It's faster, more compatible, more productive and, umm, prettier. Well, that's what the marketing guys at Microsoft would have you believe. In reality, you still need a rocket ship of a system to run it, still isn't compatible with hardware or some software over a couple of years old. Some peripheral manufacturers are still supplying compatible drivers on their devices installation discs. If ‘more productive' means having to confirm almost every single action my clicking on at least 2 ‘do you really want to do this' buttons, then we are perplexed. And do we really want to fork out £100 for a compatible graphics card that will allow us to fully utilize the ‘pretty' user interface?

Step into any branch of PC World, Comet or go to any of the online retailers. You will still see computers pre-installed with Vista that only have 512Mb RAM. That simply isn't enough. For those of you who have a long computing history, running Vista with that little RAM is like comparing a 1Ghz Pentium with a 66Mhz 486 DX2 (which also used to be the best thing since sliced bread!).

But why do we need so much RAM just to get the operating system up and running? Why do we actually ‘need' Vista? Have the backroom boys at Microsoft actually forgotten what an operating system is for?

Ask yourselves – ‘What do I use my computer for?' – It may be word processing, spreadsheets, fiddling with photos, managing your music collection, surfing the net or whatever. The fact is that none of this has an ounce to do with the operating system. It is there simply to allow the applications you use for those purposes to run and interact with your computer hardware.

In our view, Vista actually gets in the way of using a computer. It takes an age to start up fully (compare two similarly specified PCs with Vista and XP on them and wait until the hard drive stops thrashing), consumes more system resources than the actual applications you are running and seems to use 50% to 70% of the CPU resources even when its sat doing nothing! That doesn't allow much room for anything else to go on!!

Over the year we have been selling far more PCs than normal, purely because Microsoft has tied up the big system manufacturers and it is difficult to get a PC without Vista installed on it. Most businesses are staying well clear because Vista forces them to purchase far higher specified machines than they actually need to do the same job with Windows XP.