I was reading through Ed Bott's long and interesting tale of woe about Vista Business on a Vaio portable (and how the Sony people made a complete hash of it) and reached page 3 (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=429&page=3) where he describes getting a better installed version of Visio in a more recent model but where he still had a lot of unnecessary pre-installed software to get rid of.

It just reminded me that one of the benefits with not buying a "home" model for my wife was just that - that the model I did get came with a straight installation of XPPro and the few additional HP bits of software installed along with that all seem to have the aim of making getting support for the machine easier.

There's no pre-installed garbage at all - unless you include WinDVD which I'm rather happy to have as usually DVDs will run better in such a program (I usually use PowerDVD) than in either Windows Media Viewer or QuickTime.

So thanks to the neighbour for pointing out the awful build quality of her Fujitsu-Siemens "home" computer because otherwise I would probably not have started looking around for an alternative.