I’ve been running Vista for close to a year now, and though some things are done differently than they were in XP, I’ve had no issues, reliability, networking, or otherwise.

One thing to note is that there’s always a handful of right ways to go about something, and 10 times as many wrong ways. I suspect taking bad habits from XP and into Vista causes most of the “Vista-Hell” we hear about. Either that, or I’m the luckiest user in the world.

That said, I’m not sure what crack they were smoking when they dropped the std windows menus from office. Considering those menus have been uniform in almost every Windows application for over a decade, perhaps I could have been weened off them for a release or two.

Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention the fact that I’m yet to find someone who agrees with me regarding Vista. Maybe it’s because I have been exploring OS’s to varying degrees for nearly 2 decades, and have been spent the better part of the last one programming.

And oh yeah, I’m not a gamer. I like simple pleasures, like auto-aim, and being able to enjoy the game-play without spending 36 hours jamming the reflexes into my mid-brain. That industry lost me at Quake. Vista has a new video subsystem, and I’ve heard alot about that breaking games, and obviously can’t comment on it since I’ve not experienced it.

This concludes the “keep this comment in perspective” portion of, um, this comment:-)

Removed vista from the Dell computer and installed Ubuntu, never looked back. With Gutsy Gibbon right around the corner, been beta testing that, it’s going to be my new OS of choice.

The wife on her machine at home is also warming to Ubuntu. She is computer adverse, hates anything new … but she is beginning to like it. No virus checkers continuously running and interrupting her, no foolishness about programs trying to install themselves, just works. The free apps are starting to grow on her as well. Next the kids and games

No more store bought machines, it’s back to building cheap ones and installing Linux.

Just my $0.02.

The main compatibility problems are with 64 bit systems. There are fewer 64 bit drivers and you cannot use 32 bit kernel drivers on a 64 bit system. Older programs that run 16 bit installers or are 16 bit older msdos or windows programs will not work on a 64 bit system without using an emulator or a virtual machine. Main 64 bit system has 32bit os virtual pc images that work just fine.

Oh yeah, I have been a Microsoft beta tester for 10 years now. I always go for the latest OS as soon as possible. YMMV, no YMWV. I will upgrade both 64 bit machines to 4GB RAM ASAP. All 3 run 2GB RAM for now.

I cannot find any other vendor offering laptops with XP installed. Anybody know of one?

Everything I see out there comes automatically with vista, and I cannot run vista with applications I use – they don’t run on vista.

I’m about 10 seconds from switching back to Macs……

So I think it can be OK, given that you do have all the right hardware drivers, and it does appear that not all manufacturers have done a good job of this.

I’m not a Microsoft fan generally…I run Fedora on both my servers and my main workstation, but there is still some software that has no usable equivalent in Linux (or Mac).

I wonder if some of the push-back on Vista is that when we went through the teething problems on XP we were more willing to put up with the problems because of issues with 2000 and earlier Windows versions, whereas XP, in its present maturity is “good enough” for most of what we’re doing.