[LAU] OT: Windows experience..

Hi everyone, Thought I would just post a little slightly OT post just as general interest. I have been doing some fortnightly recordings of my attempts at jazz improvisation on this forum: http://improvstudy.prophpbb.com/ which I and some other musicians set up as a follow-on from the Gary Burton Coursera Jazz Improvisation course - which, incidentally, is very good (particularly for free) - although somewhat tough! For the last 2 weeks, I have been away on holiday, and then our house was being decorated - with my linux box, piano, and everything else having been packed away.. So I decided that for my next recording, I would use my (work) windows laptop to record my assignment (instead of qtractor, which I have found to be excellent for this) - thinking it should be pretty much plug and play. I did manage to record the piece, but it was much more difficult than expected: 1) my soundcard (focusrite scarlett 2i4) needed extra drivers to work with Win7. Under linux it basically works out of the box. After installing these drivers, there was very little control over the settings - I coul change the "buffer" from 0-10ms, but it seems from what it was reporting, that with a buffer setting of 10, the input delay was around 32 ms, and output 24ms or thereabouts -meaning round trip of 50+ms, which is way more than I had been trying to push it to on linux. 2) Started out trying Podium DAW for a long time - lots of hassle. Wouldn't play. In the end, I found it wouldn't play at all with the ASIO drivers for my card. Did work with the built in sound on the laptop, but whats the point of that? 3) Changed to Reaper - found layout very confusing (despite having used it before). Realised have to click the fx box to add a vsti! However, Reaper was generally a good experience. The one glitch was that it only intermittently recognised my usb keyboard - not a problem I had ever had under Linux - it fortunately worked long enough for me to record the piece once, but when I reloaded it, the USB input no longer worked - despite showing up under hardware profile.. I guess I could trouble shoot it, but I am hoping the linux box will be back up and running before I have to record the next piece!! So, overall, I found the switch from Linux-> Windows unintuitive, difficult and spent more time trouble-shooting than playing.. Sounds quite similar to what people say about going in the other direction! James