[StephM]

Personally I hate Vista. The coding has been done by a group of clowns. Alot of folk I know that have bought machines with it preinstalled are removing it and installing XP. Many in the IT world are calling for it to be binned, but that won't happen. Although a couple of folk I know don't have any issues and seem to like it, only a couple mind. The Ultimate edition has all the whistles and bells but may just be overkill for what you need. If your going to be using it purely for web browsing and a couple of apps then Home Basic should be fine, again premium would be better. The 32 bit version will be fine but 64 bit is now the way forward. If you can afford it go for the fastest Quad Core processor you can get and you'll need more RAM than a field of sheep have had. Vista has inherent speed issues due to poor coding, the most important issue for you is to get the fastest processor and as much RAM as will fit in it. We have rolled out a few Vista Business systems at work with 3GB RAM and Dual Core CPU's and they run far slower than XP systems with a quarter of their spec.

Interestingly, whilst on a Vista course last year I was told of a way of upgrading any Vista version to Ultimate, something about not accepting the agreement during install, run install 3 times, refuse each time then on the 4th accept and it'll install ultimate for you. I'll need to double check this because during the course nothing worked on Vista and I had started to fall asleep by this point. Doing a search on Google might reveal something.

Or you could just forget all that nonsense and get a MAC.