I know about the basic rule of computing: never be the first to try something radically new. Let someone else sort out the bugs.

But the 64-bit version of Windows XP has been out for about nine months now. You'd expect people to have things that, you know, worked on it.

But no.

I can take M$ removing all support for DOS programs, even though there are still ones I use. Some of them aren't even games. After all, I can run those in a virtual PC – it's not as if they need the systems' full speed.

However what excuse do, to give two examples, HP and Adobe have?

The former expect me to pretend my printer is an older model, for which M$ have probably written the drivers and which can't do things like print to the very edge of the paper.

The latter can't install their latest programs without using a trick. As the Adobe installer won't allow you to have parentheses in the program's directory, you have to give it the 8.3 format name – which, despite Adobe's support note, AIUI isn't guaranteed to be the same for every user. Get that wrong, and you have to uninstall the lot, and try again. Of course, merely using the uninstall routine isn't good enough and you have to delete files, directories and registry entries by hand afterwards.

All I can say is that anyone buying Windows Vista will need their head examining.

Not that there's much reason to do so: the highlights in the most recent 'preview' release were apparently a translucent taskbar, smoother menu fades, a different looking Start button, an IE anti-phishing feature that will either be useless or involve you telling MS about every site you visit, an 'are you sure you want to run this program?' annoyance that will be turned off within hours if not minutes and new encryption and parental controls. Gasp.