I've just had a nightmare of a development problem. In a nut-shell, I've had to import data, (specifically content articles), from one server to another.
This is normally not a problem, but in this instance the source database had each article's content split into multiple 'page' rows. Also, the source database was developed and hosted by another company. They refused to install PHPMyAdmin, (for "security" reasons), and would not give me FTP access. All I had to work with was a terrible database admin system which they'd cobbled together.
My plan was to dump the data into a new database on our server, manipulate it there, then move the shiny clean data over to the live system. Things did not go to plan...
I have a Compaq Presario F500 laptop, which comes with a built-in Broadcom wireless network adapter. Vista Home Premium came pre-installed, but the system only has 1Gb of RAM, which is the it's maximum.
Vista is so power-hungry that things were never going to go well. The straw which broke the camel's back came one Sunday afternoon when I was surfing the web while listening to music on WMP. I navigated to a site with an embedded flash video and the system froze, completely. I rebooted and tried again but got the same problem, the system was totally maxing out. It's worth mentioning that I already had Aero and all the fancy, (read sparkly; pointless), effects turned off. I came to the conclusion that Vista had to go.