Stilly -

I had an "urgent need" to get a cheap laptop to take along to Winfield, and unfortunately the cheap ones don't offer a choice of Operating Systems - so the one I picked up came with Vista.

While there have been some fairly significant security and stability improvements, for USABILITY I have to rate Vista somewhere between a ZERO and a TWO - on a scale of 100. (This is especially true if you don't have an always-on high speed internet connection or if, as at Winfield, you don't have any connection at all. Almost everything you do "calls home" - or tries to.)

Since the laptop came with something called "Office Home" which was so useless I didn't even bother to register it, I bought the "shrink wrapped" Office 2007. If you're a moderately experienced user, you'll likely find Office 2007 virtually impossible for most of the stuff you're accustomed to. Shortcut keystrokes still work, mostly, but the functions are not on any menu. Common tasks have been moved to "creative new menus" so that you have to switch between multiple tools and click multiple main sections on the toolbar to do things that used to be all in one toolbar (which they STATE SPECIFICALLY IN HELP that you can't add in Office 2007).

"Instructions" in both Vista and Office 2007, have been dumbed down to gradeschool (or pre-school) level, and I've been unable to find anything on "standard professional" procedures, menus, toolbars, etc., except "you can't do that in this program." Mostly, I think you can do that but they've hidden things to make it look like you can't do anything that "might get a total idiot in trouble."

Options that you once answered with a "Yes" or "No" now are offered as "multiple choice" with each option requiring you to read a third of a page to find out what it is, and the options change their order of presentation based on which one you've used last, or most frequently, so you have to read the whole page every time one comes up.

I'm not very happy with it - thus far. Fortunately, it's only on the laptop, which I use only occasionally. Unfortunately, since all prior versions are or soon will be "unsupported" it appears that if one wants to stay with Windows and Office it's what we'll all eventually have to use.

If you're a pre-schooler, or a magazine editor, (or maybe a JoeO?,) you might actually think it's helping you; but if you're a competent user of an older version it will take significant re-learning, if you can make something useful out of it.

I've only spent about 90 hours with it so far, and probably 60 of that has been digging through Help and searching websites. Thus far I haven't created a single useful document. I kept most of my notes while at Winfield using Command prompt and "COPY CON TEXTFILE" to avoid losing my "cool" every time I opened Word 2007. (Lin insisted, after I "lost it" a couple of times. Fortunately, I'm a veyr acruate typsit so I din'dt have to try to remebmer how to EDLIN.)

John