The crucial thing about buying a computer, in my admittedly very limited experience, is to be sure you can go to the same shop to complain about the hardware and the software. Buck-passing behaviour becomes harder and there are fewer bucks to pass.

Over the past six months, I've been struck by a trend: whereas my expert IT consulting friends, by and large, are reporting nightmares from installing Windows Vista, people who come back from PC World with a big box in the back of the car are managing just fine.

Two things, for me, make the difference. By far the more significant of the two is that experts tend to be experts in a relatively narrow field, and are reluctant to extend their expertise quickly. So, when Microsoft first showed me Vista, I predicted that in the first year most of the sales would be to the general public, and that corporate buyers would hold off. Microsoft said: "No, no. Corporates will lead, and when they take their Vista notebooks home, their families will want this cool neat stuff." And we all know which forecast was right.

The other factor is integration. By far the biggest number of complaints I've heard about Vista (from experts with varying degrees of expertise) are based on the fact that the machine they're running it on is the same machine that they built a year ago to run Windows XP.

Their computer is, in a word, obsolete. There are cards in there that will never work satisfactorily with Vista because cards are rapidly being updated to new versions that show off the features of the software. Will the XP drivers be updated? Only when the maker stops producing newer, slicker, faster cards for Vista.

For £400 you can buy a modern, purpose-built Vista machine. OK, it will be much, much faster if you run XP on it, but it's easily fast enough to run Vista. Inside the computer, the manufacturer has installed only the cards it really wants, and for which it knows there are good drivers.

That's the machine your standard grockle will tote home from the shop or order on the web. And the supplier will go beyond the call of duty to ensure that the purchase doesn't give rise to expensive support calls.