Vista and dell

[Zirax]

Well my grandad has finally taken the plunge and got himself a laptop. The trouble is he hasn't spoken to me and has gone for the cheapest dell machine with Vista. It should do everything he could ever want.

However I haven't buggered about with Vista and really he needs a machine locked down nicely. This is for when he is learning to use a machine. To give you an idea the last pc he had was for his business (windows 3.1) that the secretary used to use..... he never touched it.

Now the question I have is how hard is it to lock down vista. Mainly with regards to popups/AV some kind of firewall? (I know visa comes with a kind of firewall). Being the first time he has used a pc he is having lots of problems and really needs support. The trouble is the niggles with vista is aggrevating them.

So should I ditch vista in this case and give him a locked down xp install?

[Daz]

Vista is locked down pretty well by default, User Access Control, while sometimes annoying for a power user, does it's job well for most users while rarely being intrusive. Remote code exploits will still be targeted largely at XP and they're becoming harder to make work anyway.

Lost story short - Default installation with some anti-virus will serve most users fine I reckon