I first got burned a lttle with win95, or was it DOS 6.0, then came win 97, then win98, then win 98SE, and held off till XP Pro, and got burned a little on XP SP1, Then along came SP2 and it fixed some of the SP1 leftovers....lately I adopted a Vista...this kid is different than all the others, I got a lot to learn with this one.
My most indelible experience is all the OS's behaved differently on any same year,model manuf/hardware as well as any dis-similar machines.
That is to say, every machine from the same family genesis or mixed marriage has its own personality with a few wierd electrons here and there.
I've done transplants in sound and video cards, memory and CPU's and had good results in operating habits from the OS's to correct some of the bad OS personality traits.
I Try to stock up in workarounds, fixs, replacement software and a lot of Pro Information off the net....so as to tackle the little irritations and big conflicts when they arise.
Your first child won't help you a lot when you have to deal with the dis-similar problems the second one dreams up.
If machines and software were cookie cutter perfect, most IT's, Comp Engineers and programmers would be flippin big macs or running thier own multi-level, multi-conglomarate mega-profitable business in some other line of work...
My advice is keep a data base on what went wrong, and how you handled it, what others had go wrong and what they did to handle the problems.
Computers like People are a crapshoot, the more you know about their personalities the more prepared you'll be to deal with them...but it won't always be easy....with something like a Vista Personality...I think an upgrade video card might give this latest kid a better outlook on life..I hope..
Thats my dig...Good luck keep us informed on your experiences...with the new Kid.
jaxontop2 (hopefully)