Well it's arrived and it's much more solid (and heavier) than the Fujitsu-Siemens virtually home user model it replaces.

More on how it opens when I've opened it. (I got it home at about 8:30 PM yesterday and I've learned by experience to add graphics cards and the like when I'm not already tired).

The information on it on the HP site looks pretty good although there a few pointless PDF files (Accessibility.pdf was a single paper which consisted of about two lines which said in effect "this workstation model follows standard accessibilty principles" or some such rubbish. I didn't actually bother to read it properly when I saw what roughly it was saying) and there's a later (?) driver to my graphics card just proving which it was a good idea to switch that to one that model of desktop officially supported. (There are other relevant drivers too)

But that wasn't the "interesting thing".

No the interesting thing is that the model I got is supplied with Vista Business DVDs BUT H-P have actually installed XPPro on it.

Yes, it's one of the "pay for a Vista license and then use that license to be allowed to install XPPro" models that I've read about earlier than HP and Dell both have "in response to customer demand".

Hence the Vista DVDs (Nordic languages + English) as that's what you've paid for. But when you on startup create a Recovery disk, it's going to be a recovery disk of XPPro. Probably I'd guess with SP2 although SP3 shouldn't (as this isn't an AMD processor) cause Blue Screens at least.

As I already have a portable running Vista Ultimate and as this is anyway my wife's PC (and this time I'll be putting my assorted junk in a VM to keep it away from messing with her applications in any way), it's probably a good idea to leave it at XPPro anyway.

The only real question is Office 2007 or Office 2003 ?

For the book I wrote it was very useful to have Office 2007 on one machine and Office 2003 on another so if Office 2007 gets put on this one I have a good argument for keeping the old one ...

(Actually not so good once the "VM for my junk" idea gets known)

P.S. My wife decided on Office 2007. (Her main argument for that seemed to be the fact that we had O'Reilly "Missing Manuals" for all the Office 2007 products). So now I'm going to have to set up a VM with Office 2003 for test purposes. I suppose it will be logical to have that as XPPro-based....