stuart noble wrote
DavidM wrote

This is a bit OT but I know that there are people here with experience of
PCs and usually very helpful.

My old XP PC is starting to play up and I'm planning on replacing it in
the next few weeks. Currently looking at machines from the
Chillblast range as they seem to get consistently good reports. A
couple of areas where I'd appreciate and views and/or recommendations:

Version of W7.
Most of the systems I'm looking at come with Windows Home Premium, but
with a cost option to have Windows Professional. Win Prof has XP
compatibility, which I might/will need for some older programs I use
which aren't (and may never be) compatible with W7. There doesn't seem
to be any other advantage to me for Win Prof, but someone may think
differently?

Mail client.
I currently use Outlook Express, which isn't available on W7, so I
need an alternative. Outlook is a possible alternative but has many
features I'll never use (and will cost). Windows Live mail may do the
job but I played with early versions and wasn't impressed with it's
reliability - it may be ok now.

Mandatory requirements a support POP/SMTP and IMAP from multiple
email providers; allow two or more email accounts for different users
of PC with privacy; allow downloaded email to be left on the providers
server (where supported eg Hotmail), allow at least basic filtering to
direct incoming mail to different folder, support dlists or address
groups.

Desire able: allow import of old emails from OE (the wife and I have
quite a lot of emails that we need to retain and have access to; allow
import of addresses from OE address book.

Any advice gratefully received (but I'm not going the Unix route, so
please don't waste your time suggesting this option, though I know
that some prefer it!).

I've got a dual boot (Win7/XP) machine, mainly because my scanner doesn't
have Win7 drivers.

My overall impression after 6 months or so is that Win7 is bloody awful,

I feel the exact opposite, much prefer Win7. It does have a few
quirks, being much more secure with file sharing between multiple
machines, but that's about it and that's easy enough to fix.

and what they've done to Office 2007 is worse still. I thought I'd get
used to it all but I haven't

Office 2003 runs fine on Win7 and has the traditional UI.