Reading a bit more on it, I think all that Windows 7 is, really, is what Vista should have been in the first place - i.e. leaner in it's core than Vista turned out to be (which was a real botch-job if internet reports are to be believed). I watched system resources while I ran Windows 7 and noticed that it has similar requirements to Windows XP - BUT it does require greater graphics capability (hardware) than an XP machine for doing even simple things like playing the included chess game in 2D mode (which is painfully slow)
If I may offer my reasons for not getting along with linux - I found that it didn't offer me anything that I didn't already have in Mac OS X, and there were problems with basic hardware drivers (which was supposed to be an automatic part of the install, but just didn't work), when I asked for help with this and a few other things which didn't work as promised I was always treated in a condescending manner, as if I had no business being there because I wasn't already an expert. This has sadly been a common experience for me with linux forums, which leads me to believe that the core linux community have a big chip on their shoulder when it comes to newbies asking for help with the simple things (like getting it to work!) The worst part is that they didn't even have an answer for my queries. Could it be that they didn't know what was wrong? Or maybe because I was installing on Mac hardware and they were PC zealots.What problems did you have Astral that made Linux not worth the effort?
This is probably the best solution. Windows XP can be made to run quite fast if you turn off many of the visual effects, you can probably run Access quite happily in Windows 2000 for even faster performance.I've come to the conclusion that my Access database problem is going to have to be solved by running XP inside VirtualBox, that way I have Windows, but I'm not using it as a main OS).