When Vista was announced I had a letter published on your Letters page whinging about how Vista would not let anyone mess with it, how they had stitched it up for people who like to play with the operating system and how I would have to get the old Amstrad 664 out of the cupboard again. Well I would like to redress the balance.

I have been using Vista from Beta 2 and at the moment have Vista Ultimate on my desktop and laptop. It's an excellent operating system and, as long as you take the time to find out about it, you can do anything you want.

You can poke and prod it as well as alter registry entries just like you can on all previous operating systems. And yes, the User Access Control feature does frequently ask you if you want to proceed, but I have got used to that and actually think it’s a good idea - if anyone does sneak rogue software onto your machine then you know if it tries to do anything.

I like the Aero interface and Sidebar while the management options are very good - I particularly like the performance and reliability tools.

It runs everything that I require, including programs I wrote in Visual Basic 3, as long as I supply the Runtime. It also copes with my Delphi programs and I have even managed to load the Installshield program that came with the old Delphi4 system.

Everyone is saying the take up is slow but this is always the case with large organisations. I used to work for a blue chip company and they were always two-years behind the current operating system.

In your March edition someone complained about the start time being one and a half minutes and then went on to compare it with his laptop running XP SP2, which started in 90 seconds. What's the difference? I timed my desktop from pressing the power on button to sign on screen at 45 seconds - this is no time at all. To load the 16k Ram pack on my ZX81 took something like 20 minutes. What is this obsession with start times? One and half minutes is luxury.

I believe in knocking something if it's wrong and praising it if it's right, and at the moment in my opinion there is nothing wrong with Vista. I know they are bringing out a Service Pack, but this happened with all the other operating systems and it's simply natural progression.

And no, I don’t work for Microsoft.

Malc Parr