Don't worry too much about it. The "working name" for the replacement for Vista is already called "Windows 8." Watch for it soon!

An Impartial Review of Vista

Vista seems to be liked by people who run only things that start up automatically via plug-n-play. Mostly what works, works pretty well. Unfortunately, if anything doesn't work, there's very little help available, at least for now.

The new Office 2007 probably would seem a lot more powerful than the Office 97 that would be on most Win98 setups. But one specific task I checked out very carefully that in Word 2002 can all be done on one toolbar (that opens automatically when needed) with about 18 clicks, following the instructions in the Word helpfile exactly in Office 2007, required using three separate "main menus," two of which required drilling down three levels, with swapping back and forth between them, for a total of 73 clicks plus a couple of typed in commands (the typing shortened the process by about 11 clicks).

In previous Office versions, you could customize toolbars to get what you want. Office Help now says that the top toolbars at least are "immutable" and cannot be changed.

Word 97 actually had nearly all the "horsepower" of later versions, but you did have to figure out how to use all of it. Some things were slightly more obvious in later versions.

Phil - WinME is for all practical purposes the same program as Win98SE, with a few more patches rolled into the original disks. The very few changes added in "Millenium" just made it a bit top-heavy. For the things that actually worked, they're the same program, just with a little more clutter in WinME.

John