I've grown up with all the flavours of MS Windows from Windows 3.1 through to Vista...

Back in the early days my first experience of computers was with the BBC Acorn and BBC-B at School and at home I saved up my pocket money and bypassed the Sinclair ZX81's that my friends had got for Christmas and waited and saved and waited and saved and eventually got my sticky pre-pubescent fingers on a Sinclair Spectrum 16k.

With it's big clunky rubber buttons 16k(!!!) memory and fantastically blocky graphics - remember we had to plug them into the TV. I spent hours recording programs on tape cassettes and waiting 15 minutes for them to be played into the spectrum, run the code and Voila a really crap video game... ah... the joys of youth.

Fast forward past the various Apple, Phillips and Microsoft personal computers that I used over the following years... zoom into the working world and imagine how I gaped, open mouthed, when I saw my first Pc with a decent Graphical User Interface and that little plastic soap-on-a-rope called a mouse.

Dont get me wrong I loved DOS (MS, PC, ME, Z and all the other variations on a theme) I loved playing with memory optimizers, QEMM, FILES, UMB and all that jazz but the whole black screen with green writing thing just never had the sexiness of early versions of Windows.

Early versions were great because it was all so new (but WOW those memory problems with squeezing things into Ram):

Windows 3 First of all... what happened to versions 1 and 2? I never saw them... did they exist? 3.1 fixed a lot of the glitches from 3.0 and the best version was 3.11 Workgroups I seem to remember. I loved the old windows, it was the portal to a new computer age.

Windows 95 smelt very bad and I never liked it. the same thing applied to 98 and the dreadful Millenium Edition ...

Windows2000 (basically a sexy version of WindowsNT) seemed to fix all the problems that came with the 9x series...

XP a big step up but terrible in the early days because of driver support.... It's probably my favourite operating system to date just because it's become the global standard and software from every manufacturer can be made to run ohn it.

I've just upgraded to VISTA and have got to say I LOVE IT. The best yet... had to search for a driver for my network card (as I expected) but the user experience is greeaaat. User interface is excellent... standard software that comes with Vista is great and photo/media handling is superb. Double thumbs up to Bill and the MS boys this time.