Disappointment set in early for Vista, when many users discovered how woefully inadequate their PCs were at running the operating system. Microsoft said all you needed was an 800MHz processor, with 512MB of memory to run Vista (or a'l GHz processor with I GB of memory to be Premium Ready).

In reality, it turned out that unless you turned off all the fancy stuff - such as the Aero iQterface ¬you really needed at least a 1.3GHz processor and a minimum of 2GB of Ram. What's more, although Vista had been in beta testing for 18 months, there weren't nearly enough hardware drivers ready on its release, and many printers and other add-ons failed to work with it.

Bearing this in mind, many users have opted to only purchase Vista when it's installed on a new computer that has the power required to run it properly. This leaves millions of computers out there running XP very nicely, and whose owners are wary of upgrading it when there's no apparent need to do so.

If you're one of these people, you may be more interested in waiting for Windows 7, which promises to be a much leaner and faster rewrite of the Vista operating system and is due to arrive in 20 I O. So what can you do in the meantime?

Well, much like keeping an older car on the road, you must ensure you have all the parts required for repairing your XP installation, as well as the tools to keep it tuned and the drivers needed to operate any hardware connected to it. Here, we'll detail everything you can do to keep your Windows XP PC running reliably until you either upgrade to Windows 7 or decide it's time buy a new PC.