Windows ME was an abhorration that never should have been created. Windows ME was released on 9th June 2000 - it was released after Windows 2000. As you all know Windows 2000 is more of Network Based - so Microsoft release ME for home users and was something like Windows 2000 but caused alot of users so many problems. My favourite fault in it was: Memory Management rating on a scale from 1 - 10 = -99999999999 It also is meant to have Multiuser capability but when you have more than one user account with different profiles it messes up the whole operating system. Its support for Windows 98 drivers was terrible so it means that if you were upgrading from Windows 98 then you had to also get all new drivers. But one problem is that Windows ME was prone to crash when you were trying to install it. Even though none of the drivers were in place and hardware wasnt even recognised. Its codebase was very unstable. It was really slow. And to me that is something like Vista. Windows Vista support for XP drivers is terrible. Vista (usually) doesnt crash when you are installing it but when you try to install something on it - it will crash and tell you that it is imcompatible even though on the box it says Windows Vista Capable.e If you don't tweak Vista then it can be really slow. Once you have installed Vista on to your computer you agree that Microsoft has full ownership of the software. So basically this means that they can monitor everything that you do. Thats where (DRM) digital restrictions management becomes a big pain as you can not record much depending on what other companies have become members of the group. (Disney,Warner,Apple,Sony etc) SP1 was meant to increase startup and shut down times but no improvement has been made. My verdict is that Windows 7 will be a big hit for Microsoft and will be dramitcally improved but they need to build the operating system from scratch to achieve this. They can't use the base of Vista. If they use the basecode of Vista they will be digging a really big hole for themselves. Don't get me wrong Vista has some good points that they should include but they need to rebuild the code for the good parts to make it better then implement it into Windows 7. We will see what happens at the Professional Developers Conference on the 27-30 October where the first beta version of Windows 7 is due to be released though it might not be released to the public for another couple of months after that. Regards