Thanks for the Lifepower. Good article.

Yesterday I bought and installed Home Premium on my wife's machine . (OEM version NZ$160)

I am not usually an early adopter but in this case we needed to know that our software product works correctly.

Installation went fine it finished in 40 minutes. Activation went without a hitch.

Word of caution upgrading an existing computer is a pain in the butt. A clean install is the way to go.

FIrst major snag: There does not appear to be an easy way to get email messages to cross from Outlook Express to the new Windows Mail. If the old system and the new system are on the same machine. Windows mail also does not support adding in a hotmail account.

I tried to install Thunderbird but the installation does not work for me. I get a few windows popups and then it just stops. Great!

The desktop is very slick and for a office user it will work very nicely. However, I personally found it frustrating to set up Windows how I like my system to be. Lots of advanced stuff is there but it is hidden and tucked away.

In a few years we will all be using Vista and I am sure it will be ok. However, for the moment I found the whole process kind of underwhelming. Within 5 minutes I had the feeling of - this is just windows but with more hassles and popups.

The security pop-ups gets talked about quite a bit. Like most people I found myself not reading them and automatically clicking them away whenever they popped up. I feel the popups should have been reserved for very important events and not used as a standard event whenever Windows does not recognise the program or developer, which at the moment is about 99% of them.

All in all I would say this is a pretty poor effort for Microsoft. Lifepower mentions ME, while I don't think Vista is as bad as ME was it still feels like a "theme for XP" rather than a brand new OS. I don't feel Microsoft has made a product primarily for users. If in doubt I would avoid for the time being and check back in 8 months or so to see how things are then. As software is updated to take account of Vista things may become smoother. At the moment the early adopter is in for a frustrating ride.