I tried Presto on one of my favorite machines, a Sony VAIO T250 laptop (still one of the best displays on the market), and installation was flawless (only my Web cam didn't work) and performance was mostly, but not always, better under Presto than it was under Windows XP SP2.

When I restarted my PC I was offered a boot menu. If you fail to make a choice within 30 seconds Windows will automatically boot. If you select Presto before the timeout you will be looking at its environment in about 10 seconds. W00t.

Presto comes with a selection of basic utilities including Firefox, Skype and for instant messaging, and a range of multimedia playback utilities. For more you need to run the Applications Store program, which is available from the toolbar. And here some odd thinking raises its ugly head.

The Applications Store displays icons for each installed application, including one for the Applications Store application (reminds me of the definition of recursive: "See recursive"). In fact, installing applications is a fairly painless process although don't try, as I did, to install three packages simultaneously unless you enjoying watching your PC get borked.

While installing applications is easy, changing most of the configuration details isn't. You have to know Linux to make your way through the file system to find the tools you need. Even then you might run into problems. I tried to enable the display of the menu of installed programs when you right click on the desktop, only to find that feature doesn't actually work. And I have to admit I'm not enamored with user interfaces where some features are launched by two clicks and others by a single click.