I have two identical hard drives on the same PC controlled by a boot manager. Vista Home Premium 32bit SP2 takes 1 minute 20 seconds to boot up and windows 7 takes 50 seconds to boot up to the same state.

Originally I tried an upgrade from Vista to windows 7 but it was an absolute disaster. It took nearly 3 hours and hardly anything worked properly. A clean install was a breeze and took about 20 minutes. All my hardware and broadband were working immediately with drivers installed by Windows 7. It couldn’t have been easier and all of my software loaded without problem except Norton UAC (more about that later).

As far as speed goes it certainly boots faster and Internet Explorer 8 loads faster than it does in Vista. I cannot understand, for the life of me, why UAC has been retained in the state that it is. Microsoft had the ideal opportunity to modify it to work in the same way as Norton UAC so that it has a ‘memory’ and can be 'educated'. Hopefully Norton will upgrade their software in time.

Overall I can see no real advantage in upgrading from Vista to Windows 7. I have been very lucky, apparently, and had over two years of faultless, smooth and stable service from Vista and see no real point in paying around £100, I suspect, for Windows 7.

One thing that I still haven’t been able to find is the ability to modify startup programs. In Vista you have the ability to open up a list of startup programs in Windows Defender but I’m blowed if I can find out how to do it in Windows 7.