And that about sums it up.
Vi$ta ~ for my purposes has been fine, it comes with a lot of crap that I shall never use and I am slowly deleting these bits and pieces, slowly because so much of Vi$ta is interwoven that you dare not just zap things. It is self diagnosing and self repairing in the main so, from time to time, it fails and then goes into a lot of clicking & whirring whilst I just sit and look at a sign that says, in effect "Do nothing you moron, we are working to solve a problem that you never even knew you had" ~ eventually it says "OK we've done our best, now carry on and fvck it up again" and I lay my hands on the keyboard again. M/Soft do seem to issue an awful lot of "updates" most of them marked critical and as GM says these do take up a fair amount of space so whatever you buy get one with loads of memory and a huge hard drive.
As for my "Toy" laptop running Linux. It was £70+ quid cheaper with Linux than with XP. Very small machine with correspondingly small memory and hard drive. No use at all for downloading music, films or games. Has no CD Drive etc ~ such things have to be purchased as add on, stand free attachments ~ strange because it comes ready loaded but with a 2 disk "recovery" system
. For the purpose purchased (Communication when away from home and keeping of notes whilst researching historic facts) it is more than adequate. Anything more and I suspect I would be soon cursing the lack of memory and space. To be honest for the use I intend it a decent notebook, a biro and a mobile phone would have done as well but we live in an age of gadgets and this was one I couldn't resist, despite my having a mobile that doesn't take pictures. For that I have a camera. "Sooooooooooo last century" according to my daughter.
