Hi Kryten
Thanks for the advice, it might save me some headaches as I'll be downgrading from Vista to XP today. I've used Vista for almost a year and, as someone who generally likes Microsoft's offerings, I really feel sick and tired of them recently (except the Office team, who still seem to be heading in the right direction).
Over the last year there have been so many issues with Vista: driver problems, incompatabilities with
Microsoft's own products, and my computer's performance is gradually degrading despite my best efforts (and despite the fact that Vista is supposed to optimise itself).
The final straw came recently after installing SP1. I know it's only a Release Candidate, but I found it addressed very little (goodness help companies who are waiting for it). I then sadly bought some new (Microsoft) hardware, installed it, and something when catastrophically wrong. Sometimes I'll boot and a whole host of system programs will fail immediately upon logging in. I tried to fix things, but I can no longer access the control panel or other important system utilities because of permission errors (even though I'm an administrator). I can't rollback my system, all user accounts are affected, and attempts to manually revert to an earlier statIe are unsuccessful.
So today I'll backup my data (carefully, thanks to your advice) and switch back to XP. I hope to buy a new laptop this year and it'll almost certainly be running XP or Leopard after my experiences. I know this is nothing new for many people, but as someone who's taken so much stick for supporting Microsoft in the past, it seems a very sad day indeed.
Kind regards
Jonty
Update ~ Sorry, I just felt like moaning before, my future posts will be more constructive. Roll on Windows 7 please 