I'm now fairly comfortable with Vista. It took a while for me to get over the problem of "where the heck have all the settings gone," but I now think I know my way around it.

But it seems Microsoft are pulling the rug from underneath Vista, sooner rather than later. It's like patching up holes in the ship (with the forthcoming SP1 release) before scuttling it.

Windows 7 might be the best thing since sliced bread, or XP at least. The new efficient kernel and some of the planned features look good. Love it or hate it, Vista isn't another Windows ME. It seems the incubator is being turned off before Vista has reached full growth.

Currently testing a few online backup tools, for personal use rather than review. Uninstalling one of them from my review machine, Carbonite - covered a month or so back in the magazine, where it did pretty well - promptly popped up a big Uninstaller Survey, with this wonderful question dumped somewhere on the second page.

Question 4. Please answer this question only if Carbonite slowed your computer down:

Gee, if I'd uninstalled because of slowness, would that have helped? Heck, yeah! I prefer to have important information like that revealed when I've already removed a program and decided I don't want its services. Sigh.

Not that I did experience slowdown. It seems like a decent backup system. I'm just saying, is all...