With some of out tax return money, we bought a refurbished Dell Inspiron 530 desktop, from the Dell Outlet store, with Windows Vista Home Premium and 2GB of RAM. We took the free shipping and expected it in 5 days. It arrived in 3 days.

It's 2.20GHz Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor is very snappy. Almost as quick as my MacBook in my wife's simple test against Webkinz World website. I know, unscientific, but since it will be my wife's primary machine, any benchmark that makes her happy makes me happy.

We ran it for 24 hours to make sure there was no problem with it. This is my first purchase of a refurbished computer from Dell. I was comforted that is Dell was going to sell it with a full warranty then it was going to be great. But ran it hard just in case. Not a thing happened to give me concern.

So tonight I started up the Windows Transfer Wizard and began the process of moving the 16 GB of mostly photos and music that my wife has over to the new computer. Surprisingly, this only took 92 minutes on my in home 100Base-T network. The instructions are clear and easy to follow. The progress bar on each machine runs at a different rate to show what is happening on each computer. At the end, a simple restart on the new computer is all that is asked for.

Upon first login after the reboot, I checked that many of the documents were where they should be. All photos, music and documents appeared fine. I started up Windows Mail and it automatically converted my wife's Outlook Express Email to Windows Mail without a hassle. All her accounts and settings came over and she was checking mail in no time.

So far I am impressed with Vista. I've used it at school on some computers we have in the Adult Ed lab. It's a dog on those machines. More RAM and better processor has made this home computer very comfortable in comparison. Tomorrow I have more software to install and the problem of the printer to solve. Our printer is an HP Photosmart 7660. According to the HP website, there is a compatible driver for this model. But when searching for it, I can't find the compatible driver they state.

When finished with this migration we will be a 4 computer and 4 operating system house for the 3 of us. My MacBook from work, My wife's new Vista computer, the old Windows XP computer, and an old PIII 1GHz computer currently running Ubuntu.