The obvious retort to this post will be “you should have bought a Mac” (go on Wild Bill, say it). But the fact is that the current Mrs Adams and the gymnastic flute-playing genius needed a new computer. My work laptop was the only computer in the house capable of running the Sims 2, and although the wife’s computing needs are fairly simple (e-mail, eBay, iTunes) her old laptop is slow, drops the wireless connection too often for anyone’s liking, and has a battery that lasts about 2.7 seconds. So on the spur of the moment one day in Camberley I purchased a shiny new Compaq – 2 gb of RAM, a 120 gb hard disk, dual-core processor – for just a tad over £400. Unfortunately you can’t get a Mac for that money. And this new beast makes my IBM-provided laptop look distinctly low-spec.

Having been purchased during the Summer the Compaq, as you’d expect, runs Windows Vista. This was to be my first foray into Microsoft’s shiny new operating system. First impressions? It’s okay. I was expecting disasters after the negative press, but it seemed fine. I’ll even give it a few plus points… UPnP connectivity with the Archos has been flakey with Windows XP, but with Vista it’s reliable and fast. Nice.

But as you use Vista more you notice some things that seem a bit unfinished or just plain odd. Example: copying some files from one folder to another… if they already exist, Windows XP’s instructions are fairly simple to understand (overwrite, or don’t overwrite). With Vista I did a double-take on the dialog box, read the instructions, read them again, and was still confused.

Why, when I look at a folder, is there a green progress indicator moving across the address bar, even though all the contents are displayed? And why do I sometimes get a three minute lag when I open a folder before I see the contents.

On Sunday night I was using iTunes – although this is not my computer I’ve had to move my iTunes library onto it as it was taking up too much space on my ThinkPad. Suddenly an indicator popped up on the status bar – I clicked on it and it proudly proclaimed “This problem was caused by iTunes, which was created by Apple Inc. There is no solution for this problem at this time.”

Excuse me? What problem. iTunes was happily chugging along and working perfectly. The problem report also told me “A newer version of iTunes is available for download that might address this problem”. What problem?

I’m now looking at a laptop which is functioning perfectly but the problem report tells me that iTunes “stopped responding and was closed”. Eh? It didn’t stop responding, but it was closed… by me, after I’d finished using it.

On the subject of Windows and Microsoft, I see that the BBC are once again falling over themselves to be Microsoft’s free-of-charge PR machine. Four Microsoft stories on the Technology news page today, covering Windows 7, Azure and working with Google and Yahoo.

Among the new capabilities of Windows 7 are some touch-screen effects nicked from the iPhone. I do believe that users would need new hardware to achieve that, so at least they managed some level of consistency. The computer manufacturers will be most pleased, as will manufacturers of screen wipes.