Last week one of my mother’s friends asked me if I could transfer her life from her old computer to her new one. Naturally I agreed, but I am now perhaps wishing I had not.

See, tomorrow, when she picks it up, I am going to have to have a difficult conversation with her. I am going to have to explain why her brand new, £380 Vista laptop is slower, less responsive and uglier in every respect than her three year old iBook G4 running Mac OS 10.4. For me that’s right up there with explaining to a pubescent girl why she just started bleeding from her womb.

The worst thing is that the iBook shipped with OS 10.3, an operating system a good 18 months older than 10.4, and upgrading it to the very latest, state-of-the-art OS actually made it snappier, more responsive, and added genuinely useful features. The Windows machine, by comparison, would be very much better-off running XP or even 2000.

Incidentally, did you know that Vista’s new window chrome is drawn on top of the old 98-style windows? Seriously. It tried to show a dialogue box before it had finished loading properly, and for several seconds it was displayed in the classic livery, before the glass effect was laid clumsily on top.

Oh, and when I say glass, I mean plastic, since this thing’s graphics card has not the muscle required for the mighty Aero… even though every last drop of OSX’s prettiness is running quite smoothly on the three-year-old machine beside it.

tl;dr version: Windows engineers have never heard of efficiency and this lady is either crazy, or ill-informed enough to switch back to Windows, from a Mac.