@graeme leggett: "'there was an impact', means much the same as 'there was an effect'"

Don't forget, most people no longer know the difference between "effect" and "affect". Creating new words seems to be an activity many people enjoy (blog, [twitter] tweet, "meh", etc). Similarly, many people see no problem with appending "est" to various adjectives despite the result being grammatically incorrect. Let's not get started on "to" vs "too" or "no" vs "know".

@Jimbo: "I love never ending posts about MS VISTA by users who never bought it and yet complain about it. MS VISTA is great product if you have very good hardware, it's pretty bad on old hardware."

Vista came pre-installed on my HP Pavilion dv9260nr (top of the line notebook when I bought it). HP doesn't carry drivers for anything other than Vista; I had to download drivers for other notebook models to get XP drivers. My point is that this notebook was created explicitly for Vista, and only for Vista. I tried to use Vista, but it was just too slow and buggy. Even the Automatic Updates' "time remaining" calculation didn't work correctly. Needless to say, I shrunk that partition and installed XP after a short time, and XP works quite well. Just because a product works well for you doesn't mean it works the same for other people.

The last time I checked, all versions of Windows based on NT were operating systems -- the piece of software sitting between the applications and the hardware. The OS's job it to run apps, not to consume all of your resources. You have a serious problem if you need a 2GHz processor with 2GB of memory and 40GB drive space to execute a single application.