My background is IT and really starting with NT4 and the Pentium II, every generation of Windows has required a new processor and chip set whereas 7 seems to break this mould or, perhaps it is that we have reached a plateau in terms of hardware and it doesn’t show (?).

With regard to Photoshop, I bought into it during the 90′s and have got the price advantage of upgrades ever since. It is a massive and multi-faceted program though and I am always on the lookout for alternatives if only because people who know of my passion for photography always ask for my advice.

The best alternative I’ve come across is Serif PHOTOPLUS X3 which at around £50 is a lot better value than PS’s £500+ and has pretty much similar features including being able to handle RAW. It looks sort of earlier PS and lacks the range of filters and so on but, it does layers, masks and so on and in terms of the main thrust of PS, is probably 90% there and higher if you just want photographic manipulation.

I’ve seen some good Vista installs, but just try it on an older, resource limited computer. No, on second thoughts, don’t. Also, some of us cannot afford new peripherals, just because the manufacturer cannot be bothered to write a Vista driver. My computer peripherals work with every Linux flavour that comes along, I’m pleased to say.

Much of my work is done on a 10 year old laptop that runs quite happily on non-MS Operating systems.

I suppose that I haven’t experienced any driver problems with 7 simply because I switched to X64 bit versions of XP and Vista sometime back and that was a bit of problem with drivers so in the process I weeded out quite a lot of non essential peripherals.

You are right about Vista, they should have got a grip earlier on and abandoned it, it was supposed to have a radical new file system etc ! What 7 is really is the bare bones system that Vista should have been. To be fair and although it took them far too long to do so, starting about 18 months back, through service patches, they have finally made Vista usable.