I can say that Windows Vista is probably the MOST buggy Windows release I ever tried sice Windows 95. That's truth at least for my laptop. It has some nice things of course, but overall it's not we excepted to get after 6 years of waiting.

Well, here is my 2 cents. I bought a Vista Computer last May, an Acer 5570-4421. It is running Vista Premium, with the normal configuration ( 1gig Ram, 160 GB HD, etc. I also have Word, Excel, PPT, etc on it. I don't run games or intensive graphics programs - definitely a "casual end-user".

Vista is complete crap, simply put. It take several minutes for my computer to completely boot up. When I boot up Word, again, the thing is having a baby and takes it's slow sweet time to finally come up. Shut down of the computer is equally time consuming.

As for as the MS Office re-design, I can see where it "might" make a little sense, but it takes more mouse clicks to find basic things than it did in XP.

I recently started looking at Apple laptops, and have been reading LOTS of reviews about software and hardward, both apple and MS related. The overwhelming feeling I get is that MS tries to be too many things to all people, and the result is "bloatware". The software has to run on different brands of laptops, etc. The MS office software is apparently really buggy, and slow, based on my own experience.

I think I am becoming an Apple convert. The things just "work". For fun, I downloaded Safari 3.1 onto my Windows PC, and it ran like a champ. And, here's the fun part - it automatically imported my IE and Firefox bookmarks into Safari! It did it in the background when I ran set-up. No prompting from your's truly. I opened Safari, and they were just "there". It was a truly fun end-user experience.

I will say, in the next 6 months I'll have an Apple computer - I'm sick of Microsoft's bullshit. Buggy products that are slow, and cause the end-user headaches. They are not the only game in town anymore.....

Thanks for listening!

I have experienced nothing but amazing performance from Vista. My upgrades have always been flawless, no errors or uninvited screens popping up. When 3rd party problems occur Vista tells me how to fix them.

I appreciate your article. I agree from having used XP for all those years that Vista has hordes more features than XP ever dreamed of. I can't say enough good about Vista!

If the automobile industry built cars in the same sorry fashion as the computer software industry (especially Microsoft) builds their product, they would have been litigated out of existance several decades ago.

So we are going to look back on all of those "great features" in Vista with nostalgia, just like we should be doing with ME. How about a great feature called "reliability"? Or another one called "usability"?

Out here in the "real world" we USE computers to get our work done - not to enthuse over this or that great programming inovation that "almost" works and will be so terrific once they get the bugs out with Service Pack One or Two or Three.

As long as this industry spells "beta" as c-u-s-t-o-m-e-r, we are going to get bloated, buggy, underperforming pieces of self-indulgent coding such as Vista. I have been in this industry for almost three decades and I am starting to think that it may be time for an End-User's Bill of Rights with Article One reading something to the effect of "You (the software maker) will test your new product on something other than the consumer". Article Two will be "Don't sell the product before it really works".

As for myself and my clients - we will be staying on XP for the forseeable future - we have businesses to run, thank you.

I have been using vista since the day it came out in Nov of 06 (corp account) and have used it on everything from an OLD intel single core 2.8ghz machine to a new Dual cores (amd and Intel) and even the quad core intel boxes. So I now have it running on 5 machines of mine and have had ZERO Problems with it. Sure it doesn't run fast on the 5 year old single core 2.8 box.. but then again who would expect it to.

All the people complaining about the quality of the OS and all its security issues blah blah blah.. take a look at Apple.. the other day they released a group of 90 (yes 90!!) patches for their OS. Who here or even on that article is talking about a POS OS made by apple????

Just can see how all these people are having problems running vista on newer PC's when I have 5 personal machines and 100's in the company running it w/ NO issues.

I was looking to by a notebook with 3 high level feature : 17" screen, Decent graphic cards and... No Vita. Dell almost had it (Inspiron 1720), but it is impossible to buy it without Vista. There is no XP, Ubuntu or no-OS version of their package (and I tried hard, beleive me!).
So I order a MacBook Pro and bought a XP Home edition (first time I buy an MS OS...) and I will be happy.
So I guess I became a Mac evangelist !!

Clueless end-users will complain about everything. There is no such thing as a perfect software. All have issues especially when they are new. XP had issues when it first came out, and everyone cried that it was unstable, but now everyone wants to stick with XP. I have been running Vista since January of last year, and have not had much problem. I do agree that it is slower than XP in booting up, but that will be fixed over time. XP was said to boot up slower than Win 2000 upon its release, but that was also fixed. There are also compatibility problems, which all prior Windows Operating systems have had at one time in their infancy. When you have such a large third party base as Microsoft has, you are bound to run into compatibility issues since all vendors will not be ready for the release of the new OS. I do feel that with SP1 most of the compatibility issues have been resolved. As for reliability, I have the least amount of problems with Vista than with any other OS platform in its first year. The latest processors designed by Intel and AMD do improve boot-up performance of Vista considerably.

I have to say that in my 20+ years of working on both Macs and Wintel boxes (Mac Plus and 8088s!) I have yet to find an OS that runs as SLOW as Vista.
I have it running on a totally tricked out Dell XPS 720 8-core with 4 GB RAM, 2TB of SATA 300 drives and dual 256MB video cards and it is slow as hell. It only sees 2.5 GB of the RAM, but according to the Dell benchmarks for my machine, I am experiencing 5.3 out of 6 for overall performance. This dog has fleas and I don't think SP1 is going to fix it. However, XP SP2 runs GREAT on my quad-core Mac! Much faster than Vista. Microsoft has foisted another loser on its customers...

I know I waited on XP until SP2. At that point, I was glad I converted, AND glad I waited. So maybe a year from now, I might be interested in Vista. However, I remain concerned about old application compatibility, given my clent base.

My experience with Dell matches Martin's. HP seems to be addressing my needs with the XP "downgrade" option; Lenovo seems to "get it," with (apparently) XP options across the product line.

I'm interested more in the idea of buying Mac and loading XP. What an idea!

Doug

Peter, you say Vinda is underappreciated for the innovations it has brought to the table today. The problem is, those innovations are porly implemented. Yes, the marketing department can say they are in there, but, are they usable? Are they friendly? Are they safe? Are they well written and well implemented?

Let's look at ione such feature that you mentioned: Parental Control. Peter, although this isn't an enterprise issue, you opened the door by mentioning it, and I have tried to use Parental Control in Vista Home Premium at home, to keep young children safe while on the Internet. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work well. Parental Control in Vista allows access to violence oriented and pornographic web sites for "child" accounts because it is a poorly crafted bit of programming.

Vista in a microcosm, but that's why Vista is unappreciated; this example pervades Vista's being.

This just proves that "your mileage may differ". I really had no significant problems with Windows ME once I found that a Windows 2000 driver would work on my scanner.

I built a new high-end PC last year using Vista and the top Intel board and dual-core processor. Intel finally gave me a refund on board and processor because they could not provide four-disc raid and SATA burning with Vista. Another board and chipset solved the SATA burning and RAID issue but Vista would not install and run the latest vesion of MS MapPoint which I needed to automate within an application I wrote. So I threw in the towel on Vista and installed Windows XP on it and stopped beating my head against a wall.

The point is that just because you can run an OS without problems does not mean that the next guy can run his stuff on it and because you have problems does not mean that everyone will. I personally will wait to try Vista again until I have to for some reason and perhaps by that time Microsoft's own software will all run on it!

I said Hasta la Vista to Vista some time ago, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. While the new features are.. well, new.. they're hardly necessary in how I and many others do things now. Am I to upgrade to Vista just for the sake of doing so, and for some new rather pointless features.. and in return suffer the annoyances and compatibility issues? I've given it three chances since release, with a few months inbetween.. I've been disappointed each time, and relieved to go back to XP.

I see no justification to move to something that's slower, feels more clunky, and that simply doesnt run my applications as well as an alternative outside of just feeling 'cool' that I'm using the new OS. Two years from now that may change, who knows. But I know when I switched to XP near after it was released, I never looked back to Win 98, same with the switch to 95 and 98. So needless to say, I'm kind of disappointed in their effort.

Yeah, I remember Windows ME. I remember that a month after purchasing it, I felt like I'd been duped. Zheng is right about the worthwhile new technologies that were introduced, but the fact is that *none* of them worked right until Windows XP.

Windows ME was (should have been) a beta for Windows XP. Vista should have been a beta for the next decent version of Windows.

I was a retail computer salesperson when ME came out. Can you imagine what it feels like to have a $3500 sale returned because the OS could not make a IR connection to a portable printer (it was a Sony Vaio notebook sale) ? The store Tech person also could not make it work, hence it was returned. That OS single handedly turned me away from Micro$haft forever. Yes, I have used XP once for a year, before running away after a browser hijack to Mac OS X. In 3 years of Mac OS X .3 and now .4, I have an OS that works, is productive (using MS Office 2004), interfaces nicely with Windoze, and best of all, $0 of tech support in 3 years. In my book, Mac has it all over Windows XP or Vista hands down! Better features, works better, but yes, I keep it patched, with software up to date. No OS is perfect, but this works like the Audi or BMW.....reliable, functional, and economical. No, it is not for everybody, but companies that are truly successful, don't cater to everybody.

Audi is reliable? I guess you haven't seen their numbers in the last 5 years...

Regardless, I think that Vista is just as unappreciated as ME was. No one seems to remember that ME went on (post XP release) to finally being the most feature-rich and stable versions of Windows 9x, once all the latest patches were installed.

I can see the same thing happening with Vista, with the recent release of SP1, stability and performance have noticeably improved. People have a habit of writing things off from the get-go, rather than waiting for the product to mature.

I've used Vista from day 1, and most peoples' concerns about it are valid, but outdated. And while XP outperforms Vista, even today, remember that Win2k vastly outperformed XP when it came out, and for years many refused to migrate to XP. This is just history repeating itself.

At least Microsoft continually updates their OSes (whether you had it preinstalled on a PC or bought it at retail) for at least 5 years, and doesn't ding you $100 every couple of years for what amounts to SP-level updates (I'm looking at you, Apple).

Yo, Mr. Microsoft FUD Guy,

Vista is the crappiest, clunkiest, and clumsiest operating system that Microsoft could have released. I think that the main thing people will feel after Vista is glad that it is over. It is a resource hog, simple tasks take more clicks than they did in XP (2000, ME, 98 SE, 98, or 95 for that matter), runs video games worse, has a very crappy (irrelevant) annoyance called UAC (oh my, click okay to do this...a couple of times due to the Microsoft spaghetti of permissions and directories).

Vista is the crappiest OS I have ever touched. ME was great compared. They should have continued working on Vista for 2 or 3 more years so that they could have released a full-release product. The service pack gets it from the initial alpha product that they released as full-version and finally takes it to beta.

mykie, you are full of it on the Apple releases being like service packs. I use both OSes constantly (daily), am a power user on both, and (unlike you, obviously) am actually qualified to have an opinion on that.

I honestly reckon what Vista will be remembered as the beginning of the end of Microsoft. For the vast majority, Vista is nothing more than a $6 billion, 6 year in the making XP face lift... which by the by runs slower than its predecessor.

I switched to mac in october, and my, this is how an OS should be done. It loads in seconds, keeps past compatibility, NEVER CRASHES, is so user friendly that i knew it through and through within a week..... i can't say enough good things about it. And guess what, when apple upgraded me to Leopard (which they did for free).... it worked perfectly, without a glitch and was only 12 months in the making.

Sure, Vista works ok for a few people, but it should work for everyone, first time, NO EXCEPTION.... they are after all charging ridiculous amounts. Anyone willing to accept something that 'may work in a few years' is being foolish, and should seriously consider switching camp. I find it ironic that i've experienced less compatibility issues switching to OS X than those 'upgrading' to Vista. Microsoft is going to need a miracle, they're giving their customers away on a silver platter.

I'm not sure Vista will be remembered fondly at all. There are those of us who think Vista was nothing mre than a stopgap product, just as Windows ME was. They gutted all the really good parts well before Vista ever hit the alpha stage of development.

http://vmgblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/its-official-vista-is-new-windows-me_05.html

I think it was even more ill conceived and poorly rolled out than ME was.

Nice site of vista emulator (and other emulators) that i found

http://www.temulator.com

I bought my first laptop from Dell not too long ago. A 2.0 GHZ, 896 MB RAM, single core, laptop. Vista has caused me nothing but problems.

Poor performance, unreliability, and a virus infection that had higher User Account permissions than I did.

I never wanted Vista, but I didn't have a choice. I was barely able to afford the computer I got. And Microsoft will not issue me a downgrade license to go back to XP, since I didn't fork out money for Premium. Why would I have paid extra for an OS I didn't want, and, being someone who researches a little bit before buying, I had heard nothing but bad about this software since day one.

And now I'm stuck with it. Until I can afford my next computer, which will be a Mac. Finally, a computer that does what it's supposed to, without complaint, argument, or telling me that I need elevation to delete an empty directory.

So long, Microsoft.

I've been running Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC for 10 months, and on my laptop for 6 months, and other than a buggy video driver upgrade (Nvidia are good at this - I had similar problems on XP and kept the same driver for years after a couple of bad driver upgrade experiences), Vista has been rock solid since day one. I swore quite a bit for the first couple of weeks while I was getting used to some of the UI changes, but soon became dependent on them (now I swear at work where I use XP.) I found some hardware vendors were reluctant to put much effort (aka money) in writing good drivers for older hardware (hey, buy our new printer model instead!), and I wouldn't be surprised if that's why many people have had problems - just a guess. Also I found some machines sold with Vista that were severely underpowered - some of them I wouldn't even run XP on, for crying out loud.

Only one of my older apps was broken by Vista - a backup program I had planned on replacing with something more flexible anyway. Install of SP1 on both machines was also trouble-free. A few friends of mine have been running Vista for a while and I have yet to hear a complaint (and I would know if there were, being the techie on call whenever they have problems with their computers.)

I find the comparisons with WinMe laughable, really. WinMe was a brain-damaged Win98, which wasn't very stable to begin with. Vista is more in line with XP and 2000 - and some people seem to forget that people were bashing XP like there's no tomorrow when it came out, and that only calmed down around the release of SP2. I never liked XP much myself, with its toy-ish look that looks like absolute crap. Frankly, so far Vista has been more stable than XP ever was. Sue me.

A detail that is overlooked with Windows ME was the release was greatly influenced by the ongoing legal issues Microsoft was facing. Microsoft needed to establish a precedent that the OS incorporated features were already in the market before the courts blocked the inclusion of those features. The result was a release date greatly influenced by a legal situation. The lack of extensive testing due to a premature release may have lead to some issues not being adequately addressed. This is why we see such disparate performance with users. When things work, they could work very well. When things don't work, we see the bad press and jokes.

Given the legal situation at the time, Microsoft may not have been too eager to have all the ME issues resolved. Had the release been too good, critics may have been able to use the OS as evidence of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to monopolize the market.

I saw the ME release as a legal ploy and not as a effort to deliver the next great operating system. Only when Microsoft insiders share their knowledge of the events will we know the true story of the ME.

I'm using Vista 64bit on a quad core with 8GB RAM for intensive graphical and 3d apps - hasn't missed a beat. Everything just works - I have 64bit drivers for things like scanners and printers - I dont think this machine has *ever* crashed - although I normally unplug it at night because of lightning storms in the tropics this time of year - so its not normally on for days on end.

Very fast machine and very stable. I don't know what the fuss is about.

I noticed a user or two above reporting how slow it was on their 1GB RAM computer - 1GB is not enough - I had it on a work laptop with 1GB that was supposed to come with 2GB (HP stuffed up the order) and it was very painful to use until it was upgraded to 2GB a couple of weeks later - then it was like a new computer. I know some will say this is excessive and it probably is - RAM is cheap however.

I have been in the OS game since IBM TOS (only old mainframe system programmers will remember that one). For a number of years I worked at supporting IBM mainframe software, both for the company and then for one of its customers. I can tell you it is possible to build and maintain bug free software. It takes time, money and commitment. Ufortunately these days, nobody appears to see the need to invest in quality. 'Good enuff' just doesn't cut it in my book!

In case you are thinking that I am suggesting only IBM had quality, we also used DEC PDP's as tele-processing frontends that would run for years between re-boots, our local hospital ran Tandons that had seven-nines reliabilty, better than the network they served!

I have tried EVERY Intel resident OS since the first 8088 based PCs. Of them all, I have felt comfortable with only three: - DOS 2.1, Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2.

Others have never let me feel that I am in control, too many sudden stops or meaningless error messages.

However, after almost twenty years, I needed to acquire a Mac for part of my work. On the advice of my favoutrite Mac bigot, I acquired a very expensive Mac Notebook Pro. What an incredible combination of hardware and software. I felt immediately at home using it and, best of all, was able to install Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003 without a single problem.

But enough of my ranting, as soon as I have some spare cash, my home Intel based install of three desktops will become a Mac setup.

I have Vista on four machines on my home wireless network. Three were purchased with Vista on them, one was upgraded from XP Home. Only one has more than 1GB of RAM and all four run great (my oldest daughter's lpatop has 3GB because she does 3D graphics, animation, uses Adobe CS3, Poser, etc.) I had a problem with my Epson scanner, but some tweaking fixed that, and I had to download a driver for my Palm software. Everything else worked without any additional effort.

I too am looking at products outside Microsoft (more because of their attitude than their products), but am currently focusing on Linux. Apple is more money-hungry and plays more games with their customers than Microsoft ever has. For now, I can't afford to try a Mac.

I'll remember Vista as being the most expensive and frustrating Windows OS in Microsoft's history. That and they took away Remote Desktop from the Home versions (and also managed to break VNC, nice.)

Vista as the next ME? Actually, that's a suprisingly good description.. albeit not in the way the author intended. What did ME net us, total? A few decent features, such as generic USB mass storage drivers and native zip support...

What came along with those positives? Let's see.. a boatload of new security holes, new ways for viruses to remain persistant in a system (system restore),less user control of the system, and.. Oh yeah! A bunch of capabilities that other, third party programs are *much* better at doing.

The end result was a clunky, unstable OS that never should have been out of Alpha, much less as a commercial release. ME machines were an unmitigated pain in the butt to fix and to keep running properly.

And so far.. with Vista.. We have the same sorts of issues. Few real improvements, a lot of hype and eye candy, or "features" that are simply not needed in an OS, oceans of bloat, poor performance, compatability problems, far less user control over systems that they *own*..

And, ultimately, another overpriced, substandard OS.

Windows XP, even the original buggy release prior to SP1, could be made to work in a relatively stable and efficient fashion.. once you went into the guts and disabled all of those "Features" that MS enabled by default. When SP1 came out, with a similar lobotomy performed, XP was a great, stable OS.. I didn't even need to bother with SP2 for several years.

Vista, like ME before it, is just another sub-standard product being foisted on consumers.