Hello Jody Thornton from Aunty Jack,
Thank you for your response to my post, appreciated. I agree with you that Vista (I have Vista from Vista Starter and all versions up to Business Ultimate) despite it's detractors is in fact a much under-rated OS. We have two PC's here at home. The AMD 64 bit multi-Core 8Gb RAM and top line everything running Win 7 Home Premi My wife uses that one mainly. I love to tinker with old PC's and use a Dell Optimax GX270 (with, amazingly, a 3Ghz CPU) but a bit short on RAM. I did run Vista Home Basic and then Vista Home Premium on it (both quite fast) but decided to go back to dear old XP Home 32 bit. I have modified XP to the extent that, at idle, it runs in 184 Mb RAM. Overheating CPU, a common problem with the Dell GX series. I made a 6 inch boxed 12 volt fan (from a spare power pack) and the CPU temp under full load conditions has dropped from 70 deg Cel to 48 deg Cel.If I can find compatible RAM chips for the Dell I would like to max it out to 4 Gb RAM and run Vista Home Premium.
I am an old (middle sixties, 70 will creep up on me in a few years) techie at heart and having a second "muck about" PC and a few spare hard disks (I never delete/format away a viable OS) and test any interesting looking OS going after taking out my fully operational hard disk with it's own OS and starting with a spare hard disk put in. I don't know whether it is nostalgia or familiarity that always brings me back to XP as my preferred OS.
Anyway, I am just rambling on a bit,
Cheers,
Aunty Jack.