I know that a lot of you out there are still using Windows XP instead of Vista. In fact, I would absolutely recommend XP over Vista.

Windows Vista has proven to be complicated and unstable. I have seen numerous reports of problems with the power saving features. Hibernating or Suspending a Vista system is taking a complete gamble on whether it will crash or resume. Even if the system seems to resume correctly, you may have some minor problems until the next time you reboot. Minor problems such as networking ceasing to function. Another well documented problem is that playing audio causes your network speed to drop. Driver availability is also still a big issue. I've talked to several people who recently tried upgrading to Vista only to discover that their printer, camera, or scanner did not have drivers for Vista.

I ran across a pretty useful sounding little program today. The program, G-Archiver, is a tool that will download all of your Google Email and archive it locally. Google is huge, and I'm sure they have backups in place in case something happens to my email. However, I am still a huge proponent of having my own copy. You never know when a company might go under, or when you might be without internet access and need to refer to something. So G-Archiver sounded pretty cool to me.