@Windows Vista

ummmm..... who said Vista was a useless OS which does nothing
except slowing down the system. You just got to get a good processor and a minimum of 1 GB ram to see vista doing wonders.Its got some really brilliant features like inbuilt disk partition management system, changed start menu system, media player 11, IE7, speech recognition to perform each and every task(except listening to music coz that creates very high noise input to the speech recognition software), sidebar, improved search feature etc etc etc... there are loads of them, u just need to explore them out.
how many of u ever desired to have some system which could partition the disk without rebooting or without the windows XP CD, how many of u ever wondered if every program could be launched with keyboard only and that too in minimum number of steps.. u just need to type the name of the program u want to launch in the start menu search bar and press enter.. yes thats all it requires to launch any application in Vista, IE7 takes tab browsing to another level... providing a quick view of all the open tabs in one single page(20 tab pages at a time)... just imagine how fancy it cud be to just speak the task and ur computer recognising ur speech and performing every single task u say... and the sidebar as google sidebar is also one very useful utility.. changed wallpaper anytime, get latest news updates, stock rates and most important PC memory usage with just one click... and since it is already integrated in the OS it does not consume as much RAM as google sidebar does... similarly the improved search is also almost a copy of the google desktop search but more easily used since there is no double 'ctrl' press required.
the only annoying thing i found was the authentication which has to be done every time u run any service or feature/program.. but with time i got accustomed to it...
and atlast, not to forget the amaaaaazzing WOW! effect... its just too amazzzzzzzing to be described in words... check it out urself.