Any sensible person who reads the end user licence agreement accompanying Vista would, I'm sure, prefer to opt for a cell in Guantanamo; you basically have to spread your legs wide and bend over if you want to use the operating system. Of course, the average user never sees the licence, let alone read it. Ignorance, they say, is bliss. 

I found it funny that the administrator account disappeared when one creates an account for using Vista; this user is said to have administrative privileges but anything and everything - installing software, even making minor changes - can only be done after going through a nag screen. Ah, those nag screens, what would Windows be without them? I guess people would be left with a sense of emptiness in their lives if all these nag screens disappeared overnight.

But then on reflection, I realised that this hiding of the administrator account is merely an extension of the thinking which has always prevailed in some sections of the tech industry - security can only be achieved through obscurity. You can get back the admin account if you wish but who among the great unwashed would know how to do it?

It's easy to administer a system with an all-or-none approach and Microsoft has taken the latter option; the days of permissiveness yielded nothing but complaints so the company is now in Taliban mode. When will someone come up with a happy middle road? But that would require intelligence and a bit of thought and maybe that's too much to ask for.

Once you look around the Vista landscape, you realise that for all the sound and bluster, there's precious little available for you, the average PC user, to work with. There's no decent word processor, mail client (unless you are prepared to apply that adjective to Microsoft Mail, the descendant of the illustrious Outlook Express), or browser.

Internet Explorer 7 is every bit as sad as its predecessors; I downloaded Opera, Firefox and Safari, the last-named fortuitously being released a few days before my examination of Vista ended. Opera is about the fastest but Firefox is more configurable and, for control freaks like me, it is the best choice. Safari has too much advertising material thrown in to warrant a second look from me.

IE7 has tabs - about three years and more after Firefox made them popular - but the furniture has been moved around in a meaningless way. In both IE7 and the entire layout of Vista I was reminded of one thing - the way my wife often re-arranges our old furniture to provide the illusion that something has changed.

One can understand change if it is logical but in the case of Vista, there is often change for the sake of change. There is no point in renaming a utility or changing the layout of a certain window if there is no productivity gain. It is just plain silly. Colour it purple or pink if you want instead.