This probably be the last post from me in this thread before I write a summary for a fresh thread.
Nero 8 OEM arrived today from Scan.
Scan said they'd posted it on the 14th but it was actually postmarked the 21st. Naughty Scan, you are fibbers of the first degree.
I installed it, ran Crap Cleaner, I have 20Gb left from 150Gb which I shall now leave as a sort of HDD cache file, not good to fill HDD's up to the brim.
Nero 8 is fine, helluva lot better and easier to navigate than Nero 7.
Nero 6 was great, Nero 7 was a mess, Nero 8 looks to be on track again.
With the OEM version you can burn data and audio CD's, some video CD's but you can't create a standard DVD video disc, for that you need an add-on which costs £19.00. As the OEM version cost a fiver (well worth it for burning data and audio) that makes £24.00 so imo you may as well buy the full version for around £40.00 and get everything rather than buy the video add-on.
I am using Nero 6 on my other machine which has the video plug-in (cost me £15.00 a few years ago) so my needs are covered.
Anyway, I digress, that's about it on my Vista installation.
I decided to transfer all my business needs including the accounting software I mentioned to the machine I have with the swappable hard disks. I have a 20Gb HDD which I've installed XP and MS Office 2003 onto, plus a few other apps, that will now become the only machine/disk I do my work stuff on, and I can back it up to an external drive using Acronis True Image. An older version of True Image but that's ok cos all the drives on that machine are IDE/PATA which True Image recognises.
That machine also plays host to Win 98 and a couple of Linux Distros with different HDD's. Good fun
As I've said before, with Vista a few quirks, I dearly would have loved to have utilised 4Gb memory but it was not to be. I've found a 'fix' for this, I may buy another 2Gb memory and try this fix but I'm honestly wondering whether it will be beneficial or not, 2Gb seems to be working fine.
And one last thing - I really deplored the way Microshaft only made Halo 2 work in Vista, that's low, it really is, but I did buy that game and I have to say it is a very enjoyable game indeed.
In fact it's been quite some time where I've looked forward to evening time and another coupla hours playing Halo 2. The graphics ain't that great, not as good as Crysis for example or even Call Of Juarez but the gameplay is really lots of fun