It seems that the Windows XP preloaded on the HP pavilion my wife brought still has lots of issues, even after I applied SP1 and all the fixes from the microsoft website. Windows now popup *under* the active window, transition between windows using alt-tab is slow and often leaves artifacts (on a nearly 3Ghz processor and a well equipped graphic card for pities sake). Worse still losing a dialup connection makes the system hang and require a power cycle.
Also the scrollpad of the trackpad doesn't seem to be supported by XP and neither does clicking on the trackpound click the pointer.
All this on a machine 'designed for windows XP'. lame, lame, lame, lame. It doesn't go any faster than my 1 GHz 3 or 4 year old notebook running Redhat 9. For 700 quid you would expect a laptop that was faster and more responsive than something you can get 2nd hand or refurbished for a couple of hundred.
Oh and as davorg pointed out, the auto-update thing is a PITA, it took most of an evening to update the new installation of XP and within a week I have to revisit the website for yet more. I also get a popup every time I start or resume the system telling me to get updates and to get a .Net Passport.
Also really annoying is the way that I can no longer remove lame, useless 'helpers' from the taskbar on the bottom right down by the clock. MSN Messenger is apparently a critical part of win XP and so cannot be removed and disabled as obviously my user experience would be hugely diminished without it and its constant whining that I haven't joined the borg yet.
http://www.xp-antispy.org/
It tweaks or removes crud you don't need (including Messenger).
