Oh holy cats Ed, my brother, just try SUPPORTING these abominations (not just using them). ME, OMG what a disaster. Like 98 it had known memory leaks. 2000 (the server version) wasn't bad but it was no improvement over NT4.0. CE was a joke. XP looked promising but it quickly devolved into multiple versions (home, pro, etc.) which made support almost unpredictable and now we have no less than 6 versions to support with Vista. Oh and guess what, to maintain your MCSE certification you need to be certified ON ALL 6. Nice little haul for MS training programs eh?

The only thing they've ever got really right was NTFS. It took them what, 20 years to come up with a robust and fault tolerant file system--something the Posix community solved 20 years before that. They continue to be plagued by viri and hack exposures--something the Posix community had solved for 20 years (modularized OS) and maybe the world can forgive them for spending the last 20 years trying to re-write the SQL spec to M$'s liking only to adopt the same solutions to the same problems that IBM solved 30 YEARS BEFORE THAT.

But hell, don't take my word for it. Look at what M$'s core developers actually work in: Perl. Yes, that's right, Perl and open-source technologies which they then port over to Visbasic and VB2 or whatever frankencode platform that have cooked up.

For all of this, are they raising the sophisticaion and capability of the users? Hells no. M$ users are still typing emails and word docs, sending Hamster Dance world wide and calling Geek Squad every time they see BSOD. Put them on a Posix system and they start learning all kinds of things, becoming self-supportive and productive.

All this talk of "service packs" is just a masquerade for beta testing on the public. Run a service pack and see what percentage of files have been modified--often in the 90% or higher range.

That's not bug-patching. That's rolling out a new OS. You pay for the OS and then you pay more for lost productivity, equipment that's been arbitrarily rendered obsolete and Gods only knows what happens when you get hacked.

To those who scream "but we need licensure so we get support". IMAGINE NOT NEEDING IT.

Microsoft offers free monthly upgrades for their operating systems. These upgrades are designed to protect against hackers and other problems if you are using the Internet at all.

AFTER DOING AN UPGRADE, NO MATTER WHICH MICROSOFT OS YOU ARE USING, DOUBLE CHECK ALL YOUR SECURITY SETTINGS, BECAUSE THE UPGRADE CHANGES SOME OF THEM SO THAT MICROSOFT CAN PROFILE ITS USERS.

One major symptom of MS tampering is a longer downloading/uploading time for large files, like videos.

lol I liked the video but I have Vista and I love it!

The time it took to make that video... must have been done during the crashes. What operating system was used to make it? There are hundreds, you know. Or was it made on Vista?

This video implies that we must look to Microsoft for the OS answer. Good advertising for the Microsoft Man.

Ed,

 I am not surprised Vista is working well for you.  It is Vista SP2.  When Vista first came out it was an unmitigated disaster that Microsuck wouldn't admit to.  For  over a year Vista would routinely crash their machines on a daily basis for the majority of its customers.  This included brand new -- powerful -- Vista certified machines.  As a result many businesses refused to go to Vista and demanded XP installations. 

When SP1 was finally made available a great deal of these problems went away.  Fixes since have improved the operating system which is to this day still an enormous resource hog and performance sluggard. 

Win7 is really Vista SP3 -- which should run rather well.  If you got your machine a couple of months ago I would encourage you to get your free Win7 update after Oct. 22nd.

It was a humorous video - I'll give you that.

Given that I'm an experienced computer user (and ex-programmer) I know what to watch for and don't just click wildly on everything...

I don't see what all the hype about how bad Vista is.

Ive used 95, 98, ME, and XP, and I have minor gripes about each - but I get my computing done - always have. 

Two months ago, I purchased a HP Media Notebook/Laptop at Costco for about 6 bills (it was a floor demo so I saved about $100) and it came with Windows Vista for it's operating system.

I had more problems with ME than Vista - and I never had problem one with XP.  I haven't had my laptop crash ONCE so far. 

Granted, I have to pay for Norton anti-virus, but other than that I don't see any reason to say "Vista sucks".

my 2 cents,

Ed