Syntagma was recently 78,000 on Alexa — not a bad score given the number of sites out there.

Then, inexplicably, it started to rise. Up to 180,000.

Since I’ve switched to a Windows Vista machine with no Alexa toolbar it’s gone up to 325,282. Can this be my own doing for not supporting the number every time I go to the site?

No, Alexa is rubbish. Our traffic has risen enormously in the very months it’s gone from 78,000 to 325,000.

Why do we bother quoting these useless statistics?

It must be a quiet day for news when people start showing you pictures of their desks. It could be a lot worse, of course, so we shouldn’t complain. Duncan Riley did it yesterday, and I’ve seen any number around the blogosphere.

My excuse is that it’s been raining here for days so I can’t fulfil last week’s promise of pics taken along the Devon coast. I also get a bit twitchy when I can’t photograph anything. I know that sounds like an addiction but I call it Window-On-The-World Syndrome.

So, yes, here’s a snap of my desk in the Syntagma Towers’ office :

The box on the left is a Windows Vista machine, which I use nearly all the time now. On the right, is the old XP box. There’s still a lot of stuff left on it which I can’t move over : programs incompatible with Vista and mountains of Word and Excel documents.

Incidentally, I’ve discovered a good way of transferring material between computers without fitting a cable between them or burning a disk. Just put it in a Gmail attachment — you’re allowed up to 20MB now — and email it to yourself. Switch on the other computer, and there it is waiting for you. But I expect you knew that.

The boiling question of the day is, what does your desk say about you? Is it cluttered or uncluttered? And if you think that’s a silly inquiry, one business guru wrote an entire book about cluttered desks. I suppose it was a gap in the market.

In case you missed the first pic, here’s a wider shot showing a bit of context. Not much, but you can’t have everything :

But I’ve entertained you long enough …

We’ve had Windows Vista for a month now on brand new kit intended to replace our XP boxes here in the Syntagma office. Previous posts (here and here) described our initial experiences, so I won’t trawl through them again.

Although we still have our XP machines running alongside the new Vista boxes, the proportion of usage by time has swung massively in favour of Vista. We’re now using the V-machines for 90 percent of the time.

The exceptions are still jobs which require the printers, like accounts, stats and letters for Post Office delivery. None of our printers will work with Vista, so we’ll be replacing them very soon.

Everything else is now happily done on the much faster, number-crunching, new computers. Of course, we’d switched a lot of stuff online before moving over : all email is now done on Gmail — a huge relief on new computers — and much else too. I’ve even taken to using Google Documents for smaller jobs, but can’t quite get myself to use the spreadsheets, especially as we now have Office 2007 Excel working on Vista.

Thankfully, our desk-top-publishing program works seamlessly on Vista, but not the image-handling one. As a temporary measure I’ve been using the Office image software bundled with Windows itself. It works so well, I’ll probably stick with it for the duration.

Apart from that, the increase in performance is so good, we stifle a groan every time we have to use the XP machines.

I know a number of our readers are looking for new computers with XP pre-installed, as they don’t trust Vista yet. Let me tell you, put your doubts aside. Get as much as you can online — Google is a blessing here, buy new printers, tweak your internet connection, and you won’t look back.

Be aware, though, that the “Protection Mode”, which is the default setting for Vista, may have to be temporarily shut down while you add new stuff or get your broadband connectivity working. Thereafter, it’s surprising how quickly you will adapt to the loss af admin powers, which is what it effectively does.

Syntagma’s Advice? Go for Windows Vista now. There’s nothing to keep you on XP but your fear of the unknown.

After converting the office in one go to an entirely Windows Vista and Office 2007 environment, we are now starting to run into compatibility issues.

Some of our bedrock programs simply won’t run on Vista at all. The alternatives are to search out new versions which do — and go through yet more learning curves — or run our XP machines alongside the Vista boxes. The latter is what we’re doing, despite the huge increase in desk space required.

Even more seriously, none of our printers work with the new Windows either, and we can’t find updated drivers on the net. This means using the XP boxes for all paperwork — less now than it used to be, but still substantial.

Ultimately, we’re going to have to upgrade our printers too, but not yet. There’s no guarantee that machines currently in the stores will have Vista compatibility at present.

So we’re stuck here in a curious hybrid situation, with humming boxes and hundreds of cables perched and strewn everywhere. To combat “electronic smog” we’ve imported lots of spider plants (very good apparently), and are considering ionizing machines as well.

By the time we’ve finished, there may not be room for humans at all. Probably just as well.

Who says new technology gives “greater convenience”?

Mind how you go.