XP grinds to a halt when I run the following at the same time:

• AutoCAD
• Outlook
• Word
• Excel
• a handful of file explorer windows
• a (slightly larger) handful of tabbed web pages

I can tolerate the compression artefacts, although will probably enquire as to what settings they're using.

But what's mostly annoying me today is why the file explorer/Outlook gives me the default option (under 'Send to... Mail recipient') to send an approx. 400x400 pixel PNG file as 1024x768 size, then proceeding to convert it to a fucking JPEG

...Oh, and there's also the small matter of not including my signature either, when using 'Send to'

Unfortunately the client Outlook has some serious oversights like the local e-mail database happily starving the system of storage.

As for any Windows beyond XP, I've heard nothing but gripes about it, and I personally hate supporting it.

I'm not surprised, the killers will be AutoCAD and IE which will consume large amounts of non-paged memory, which is very limited on XP regardless of the amount of physical RAM.

Image compression should only impact bitmap images, all GUI graphics, lines/windows/text etc are passed through from the host OS to the guest and should look identical to the original. Turning compression off is fine on a local LAN, but not advisable over a remote connection or tunnelled LAN/WAN - it will probably make the client very slow.

All scaled images are converted to JPEG, I'm not aware of a way to change that. Probably best to avoid using "Send to" for anything other than non-image file types.

I believe that is normal behaviour, "Send to" is neither part of Windows or Outlook. It's the MAPI client, which is the underlying Mail API which is a programmatically means to send eMail, as such it never includes signatures because the eMail isn't strictly coming from a user. I realise that does sound somewhat odd, as you're doing it, it fires up the eMail client and then proceedes to send as the user!

Signatures in Outlook are a particular mess, that MS have never resolved. Enforcing a signature policy company wide has always been a particularly interesting challenge.

That shouldn't happen, unless you have a massive OST file, anything beyond 2gb and there's a problem. If you have more that 512mb of mail your inbox, it's advisable to archive it off. Larger companies will enforce an automated archive server side to avoid such issues, if you don't have that facility you can archive to a PST file - the bane of all sys admins!

That's a common complaint about every successive OS MS have released. As someone that builds companies IT infrastructure from the ground up, I have to say that support of the OS does get easier with every successive OS. Where things start to get messy is all the bundled rubbish you get with the OS, I always advise companies to lock down what ends up at the user, to reduce the breadth of "apps" they need to support on the OS.

Windows 7 is certainly getting close to what a sys admin requires to implement a secure desktop in a large organisation. For mid to low sized companies, it's probably somewhat of a pain, unless they have a very skilled team that understand low level registry, file and service permissioning and have implemented an enforced windows policy via GPO and AppSense or the like.

Windows 8 - no large organisation would risk rolling out a current OS, unless there's a pressing security reason to do so. I'd also expect companies to skip Windows 8 at the desktop, although it does have advantages in VDI, particularly over Windows 7, which requires twice the resources of XP.