Well my 7 year old 933mhz 384mb 40gig Dell with the 17" CRT wasn't doing it any longer. More stuff wouldn't run than would. So I took advantage of a good Best Buy package and got a Gateway with an NICE 19" flat panel monitor (that alone is worth the changeover)
BUT...
It has that goofy Vista OS. Overall not bad, but it is a case of the dumbing down of America. EVERYTHING is a graphic. What?... we have suddenly become incapable of reading and must depend on cartoon graphics to show us the way? The "wow" factor lasted about 20 minutes, now I'm already bored of all the flashy pictures, graphics and colors and have already begun to turn stuff off. With a little luck, I'll be back to XP performance in a couple of weeks.
On the flip side, it did load up and configure itself well. Adding hardware is a breeze, even easier than with XP. I haven't yet tried to hook up my 7 year old printer yet, but can't imagine that it will be an issue either.
Oh... I HATE HATE HATE the new prettied up graphics on the games (Spider Solitare mostly). Really hard to concentrate on the meaning of the card when there are 30 colors on every screen.
Just a vent.
Overall the OS is fine, the change is inevitible as XP will be unsupported in a couple of years. The computer is very quiet and powerful (Athlon X2 DualCore 5000+ 2gig 320gig drive) with only a junky mouse (already replaced with my old wireless version) and a hard to find CD eject button to complain about.
Just a report of my day.