What amazed me most of all about Windows was how it would gradually creep across your hard drive taking up more and more room. My last Windows install was taking up 10Gig before I killed it.
I agree about the laptop thing too. I have a vintage Compaq Armada laptop that came to me with XP installed and it was just soooooooooo slow. Now I've got Puppy Linux on it as the operating system and it's a really great and useful laptop that does everything I want.

