It has Vista home premium on it. I'm not going to argue about the idea of vista sucking or not sucking, but I thought this one thing was interesting: I have clock gadget on my desktop. f Yet there is the ever present clock in the right hand corner of the screen (you know that has been in windows "from time immoral" as they say in Sacred 2.)
Heh Maybe it is for people that just want a face clock to look at?
Anyway..*Gets all giddy* NEW PC NEW PC NEW PC!
First one I've had in..years.

CONGRATS MAN.
And vista doesn't suck, don't believe the hype. it's good for people who know how to use it.

Congrats matey, you can now play all the disapointing FPSes which came out this year. Or you can play Unreal Tourney... at maximum settings.

Or all the GOG's he ever wanted
... I got reminded of this strip from User Friendly.
Personally I didn't have much use of the sidebar (I now run 7 where it's gone, hence the past tense), or its gadgets. Now, if they were useful (like very few of the third-party Mac OS X widgets) and (almost more importantly) hid when not used (again, like in Mac OS X) I _might_ use them.

By "Know how to use it" he means "delete it and have an XP disk on hand" >.>
Vista is .. annoying for one unfamiliar with it, but the biggest problem with Vista is it IS a resource whore, which if your specs are not monsterous, then you can end up having major issues running games.

I quickly grew to like Vista. It's a pain to drop back to the mixed XP/2K/OSX10.3 environment at work now.
Sidebars and gadgets have grown to irk me more. I used to use a dock, but with a widescreen monitor, I find it better to shifty stuff to miniature icons on the vertical taskbar. Not sure if I like what W7 does yet.
That said, My new PC (Of Jan this year) has mainly been used to play older games. Part of me thinks on why I actually bothered to get it, until I try use my previous 5+ year old one in the next room.

I have mine at the top; for some reason it just felt natural there. Perhaps its because I used Amiga OS 4 for so long, going to the top of the screen for functions seems more intuitive.
The gadget sidebar was the first thing I removed, I can't stand the thing for some reason, I have a real clock in the room and also a calender... what else seriously do I need? Perhaps I've missed out, does anyone know of any ones which are super helpful?

in the past week, on my machine I've run winxp, win7, and I finally went back to Vista.
why?
because it's the only platform I could get all my games working on. :O
It was kind of depressing, but I know how to hack my way through Vista to get what I want. XP had issues with the sound drivers (meaning when I recorded from "wat u hear" it came out all distorted, and when I tried running win7 many games just would not play. So after switching back to Vista I got my games running and there were no sound issues, but this is machine specific here, the drivers that are on my computer were designed to work within vista, and they do that well, they don't work as well under xp or win7. :(
But seriously, Vista is known to be a resource hog, but the only thing that's hogging resources is the damned aero interface, so if you turn off aero it's not as big of a deal.

I'm glad that its not as bad as it was originally regarded to be, I'm a few months away from getting a new PC, and I was seriously considering waiting until I could go for Win7.

I like Vista well enough (I use it, anyway), but I do wonder what possessed Microsoft to make some of the most-used functions so inaccessible.

trying to emulate apple by making things easier for the user. :/

yeah, i agree. it's not as bad as everyone is saying.
bought vista home premuim x64 just for playing games and i'm happy with it. still got linux running on the same computer for everything else i need to do ;)

I agree vista doesn't suck that bad and surely doesn't deserve all the flak it gets.
Here's a tweaking guide from tweakguides if you havent checked it out.
http://www.tweakguides.com/VA_1.html

Vista works. That's all I can say about it.
Vista 64 Ultimate here.

this
they need to realize that pc users buy pcs because we understand them. switching things up on us isn't going to make it easier for the computer idiots, and will only piss of the fluent.
edit: oh, and congrats! getting a new comp always gives me such a warm, fuzzy feeling.