Windows XP D-Day arrives Monday, June 30

[SCDVD]

I saw another example of "the new version sucks" mentality this weekend when I was perusing some Sony Vegas forum web sites. Some of the comments sounded much like the anti Vista comments. You could substitute Vegas Pro 8 for Vista and the comments had the same negative tone. I use Vegas Pro 8 and find it to be very stable as well as full featured.

I suppose the reason for this is that people tend to resist change. If it different, there is a tendency to not like it. If it requires upgrades to hardware or drivers, there is also a tendency to resist it. But I believe one of the biggest reasons is that people need to blame something else for any problem they have. It's much easier on the ego to blame something else when the problem is actually the user's own mistake or misuse. If for no other reason, I would hate to be in the software business. That aspect to human nature would drive me crazy. I'm sure guys like JohnnyMaleria who are in the software business have some interesting stories to tell about this.

[mpack]

I suppose the reason for this is that people tend to resist change.

They certainly do, it's a part of human nature. There is no point in complaining about this, it is simply a fact of life.

So, if you want them to embrace change you must give them a good reason. Have your computer desktop look prettier, and have the OS run slower, hog triple the memory and take 3x as long to boot up... doesn't do it for me...

--Don Milne.

[MOVIEGEEK]

So, if you want them to embrace change you must give them a good reason

I agree and I'm still waiting for a good reason why I should upgrade to Vista.Cosmetics aside what does Vista do functionally that XP SP3 can't?

[SCDVD]

I suppose the reason for this is that people tend to resist change.

They certainly do, it's a part of human nature. There is no point in complaining about this, it is simply a fact of life.

So, if you want them to embrace change you must give them a good reason. Have your computer desktop look prettier, and have the OS run slower, hog triple the memory and take 3x as long to boot up... doesn't do it for me...

--Don Milne.

You must really miss the good old days of Window 3.1 when 64MB of memory would work just fine. When you say that Vista boots slower, you are just misrepresenting the truth. I suppose this kind of comment helps add to the "grizzled old veteran" illusion. You're not trying to boot Vista on that old 64MB system are you?

[orsetto]

Of course it can't be denied that those who hold their nose at Vista will be left behind in the not too distant future: this is Microsofts show, and you defy them at your peril.

But the other side of the picture is less clear to many of the tech-literate members here: there are MILLIONS of consumers with barely stable XP setups, or even 98 and Millenium installations, that they feel works for them. They are terrified of any updates or new OSes because it can send their entire years-old assembly of stuff into the crapper. I can't tell you how many people I've encountered who are still running Millenium (ick), and even though they are crawling with viruses they will not let me update them to XP or Vista because prior upgrade experience resulted in months of patches, driver updates and debugging. They would rather stick to the unstable mess they know than go thru the pain of an upgrade. I'm speaking here of the totally un-tech-savvy crowd, whose sole uses of a PC are eBay, email, websurfing, accumulating mass quantities of JPEGS and other media files, and participating in dozens of chat and social sites. These folks absolutely will not stand for having their jumbled PC life shattered and reorganized over long periods of time, and every damn Windows upgrade requires this. Lots of hardware, printers and software dear to the hearts of consumers has to be radically upgraded for each new Windows, and they are unwilling to spend the time and money necessary to move forward.

For most any home user with a PC older than three years the easiest route to an upgrade is to just buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed. But even that causes a personal trainwreck: they still find that much of their stuff doesn't work and all the software, media files and social profiles they've amassed start acting wonky. They freak and want to go back to their old computers. Personal home-use PCs are not neatly organized and maintained and censored like a business network, so upgrading most of them is a horror unless you are an extremely patient soul with a lot of Windows upgrade experience. If you can't guarantee your friend that every last thing they use will work perfectly within 24 hours, advise them to pay a professional and just get out of the way. I've seen friendships destroyed over a botched Vista upgrade: if you can't do it yourself, hire a pro you don't personally know to help you.

[SCDVD]

@ orsetto. Well said - and every one of these people will blame Vista, Leopard or whatever for their problems. The specific OS makes no difference. The keyword here is "new".

[SCDVD]

So, if you want them to embrace change you must give them a good reason

I agree and I'm still waiting for a good reason why I should upgrade to Vista.Cosmetics aside what does Vista do functionally that XP SP3 can't?

Here are a few http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_Search#Search But if you are just checking email, web surfing and typing an occasional letter in Word, it probably won't do much for you. But for those who are willing to take a look at the new features of Vista, it brings some worthwhile new capabilities. But if you try to run Vista on that old BelchFire 109 PC that you bought in 1999, you will be unhappy.

[JohnnyMalaria]

What is it now... 2008? And XP support will be till when...2014?

Good. I got six more years.

For sure, you can remain frozen with what you have now and still run it in 6 years. You can do that anyway - irrespective of MS supporting the OS or not. But expect new software (open source, freeware and commercial) to come along that only supports Vista or later. And some of that software you will want very badly. Think what widely-used video-related software used today couldn't run on Win9x.

[Dv8ted2]

So, if you want them to embrace change you must give them a good reason

I agree and I'm still waiting for a good reason why I should upgrade to Vista.Cosmetics aside what does Vista do functionally that XP SP3 can't?

Every user is a limited user by default. There is a new virtual path and registry to protect against things hosing your system. Those are just a few of the many enhancements. SP3 for XP is just a rollup package of previous updates with four extra features. There is black hole router support, keyless install, and NAP.

Vista is far more improved than XP.

[Noahtuck]

So, if you want them to embrace change you must give them a good reason

I agree and I'm still waiting for a good reason why I should upgrade to Vista.Cosmetics aside what does Vista do functionally that XP SP3 can't?

Here are a few http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_Search#Search But if you are just checking email, web surfing and typing an occasional letter in Word, it probably won't do much for you. But for those who are willing to take a look at the new features of Vista, it brings some worthwhile new capabilities. But if you try to run Vista on that old BelchFire 109 PC that you bought in 1999, you will be unhappy.

I do WAAAAAY more than that and i have yet to find anything i NEED to do or WANT to do that i can't do in XP Pro 8)

I'm sure the day will come when i will have to change over to VISTA because of hardware or software issues... oh wait... by the time that day comes VISTA will be old and there will already be new OS's out there.... hey yeah... just saw something on tv about the new M$ OS coming out when ?? next year
They called it windows 7

[SCDVD]

I'm sure the day will come when i will have to change over to VISTA because of hardware or software issues... oh wait... by the time that day comes VISTA will be old and there will already be new OS's out there.... hey yeah... just saw something on tv about the new M$ OS coming out when ?? next year
They called it windows 7

But you will have to use Vista then because Windows 7 will be new and therefore it won't be any good according to the "hair on the chest" crowd.

[Dv8ted2]

So, if you want them to embrace change you must give them a good reason

I agree and I'm still waiting for a good reason why I should upgrade to Vista.Cosmetics aside what does Vista do functionally that XP SP3 can't?

Here are a few http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_Search#Search But if you are just checking email, web surfing and typing an occasional letter in Word, it probably won't do much for you. But for those who are willing to take a look at the new features of Vista, it brings some worthwhile new capabilities. But if you try to run Vista on that old BelchFire 109 PC that you bought in 1999, you will be unhappy.

I do WAAAAAY more than that and i have yet to find anything i NEED to do or WANT to do that i can't do in XP Pro 8)

I'm sure the day will come when i will have to change over to VISTA because of hardware or software issues... oh wait... by the time that day comes VISTA will be old and there will already be new OS's out there.... hey yeah... just saw something on tv about the new M$ OS coming out when ?? next year
They called it windows 7

2010 to be exact

[Noahtuck]

I'm sure the day will come when i will have to change over to VISTA because of hardware or software issues... oh wait... by the time that day comes VISTA will be old and there will already be new OS's out there.... hey yeah... just saw something on tv about the new M$ OS coming out when ?? next year
They called it windows 7

But you will have to use Vista then because Windows 7 will be new and therefore it won't be any good according to the "hair on the chest" crowd.

Nah... i'll still be using XP Pro :P

[CogoSWSDS]

SCDVD wrote:

But if you try to run Vista on that old BelchFire 109 PC that you bought in 1999, you will be unhappy.

Oh I don't know about getting Vista to run on my old BelchFire 109. I think we should get Microsoft to write an OS for this computer. Should be an interesting build, don't you think? :P

Sorry guys, I couldn't resist. It looked like an interesting, if futile, project.

CogoSWSDS

[FulciLives]

I bet some of the Linux builds would run A-OK on that BelchFire 109 PC from 1999 8)

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[mpack]

You must really miss the good old days of Window 3.1 when 64MB of memory would work just fine.

A cheap shot, not very becoming. For your interest however, as a programmer I chaffed against the 64K boundary in Win3 and jumped ship the day Win95 was released (in fact before, since I was a beta tester). Win98 was a decent upgrade that I went with. ME I ignored. XP - I waited until SP1 then switched for solid reasons I gave earlier. Vista? Minor upgrade to XP, but carrying far too much baggage right now which has had a terrible effect on performance. I''ll wait for a service pack or two and see how it looks then (Vista SP1 has indeed improved matters).

When you say that Vista boots slower, you are just misrepresenting the truth.

Nope, I'm quoting actual benchmark results of Vista, Vista SP1, XP(SP2) and XP(SP3) on identical (top end) hardware. You can find the comparison in issue 215 of the UK mag "PC Format" (page 80). It may be viewable online, I don't know. Central results were that at idle, XP consumed 160MB RAM, Vista consumed 780MB. Boot times: XP(36s), Vista(65s), Vista-SP1(76s) - these were all new installations, no extra crap. There were loads of other benchmarks. In each case Vista was the same or inferior (sometimes markedly so) in comparison to XP.

The fact is, in performance terms, XP is clearly better. In hardware support terms - well I'm not aware of any hardware that XP doesn't support so I guess they are equal.

[Dv8ted2]

Vista? Minor upgrade to XP, but carrying far too much baggage right now which has had a terrible effect on performance. I''ll wait for a service pack or two and see how it looks then (Vista SP1 has indeed improved matters).

There is nothing minor about it. It was not even based off of XP. It was based of of Server 2003. You are spouting off useless information because you do not even use Vista.

[mpack]

There is nothing minor about it. It was not even based off of XP. It was based of of Server 2003. You are spouting off useless information because you do not even use Vista.

I didn't provide any information, I stated an opinion: Vista is a minor upgrade from XP. This is not a description of which source code branch it was based on, it is a description of perceived relative functionality.

In any case, I'm not really interested in discussing the merits of Vista with uncritical fanboys: you are entitled to your opinion as I am to mine. I'm more interested in hearing whether anyone knows which if any of the dates given here for official XP availability (June 30th 2008, 2010, 2014) is the correct one. I'm pretty sure that the first date - given at the start of this thread - is not the correct one.

[JohnnyMalaria]

I didn't provide any information, I stated an opinion: Vista is a minor upgrade from XP. This is not a description of which source code branch it was based on, it is a description of perceived relative functionality.

Can't argue with someone's perception (since it is a valid reality) but to describe Vista as a minor upgrade from XP is technically wrong and it isn't constructive to create new definitions of minor vs major upgrade. Perceptually, Vista may offer little benefit over XP in your mind (as it is in many other minds and equally not so in others). But Vista is technically a major upgrade. XP is a minor upgrade of Win2K which, in turn, is a major upgrade of NT4.

NT4 = Windows NT 4.0
2000 = Windows NT 5.0
XP = Windows NT 5.1
Vista = Windows NT 6.0

In fact, only XP is the minor grade of the NT kernel Windows client OS in more than 13 years.


FWIW, I've been using Vista extensively since Nov 2006 (probably put in more than 2000 hours on it) and, to me, it wins hands down over XP.

As Dv8ted2 states, Vista's lineage is with Server 2003, as is XP x64. If you have ever used XP x64, it is very obvious.

Regarding availability, a simple Google search returned this link which answers your question quite unambiguously:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/apr08/04-03xpeos.mspx

[mpack]

Regarding availability, a simple Google search returned this link which answers your question quite unambiguously:

Thanks for providing the link. It seems that the BBC report I saw was accurate then, though I hadn't appreciated that it only applied to XP Home, and not (eg.) XP Pro.

[SCDVD]

FWIW, I've been using Vista extensively since Nov 2006 (probably put in more than 2000 hours on it) and, to me, it wins hands down over XP.

I'm convinced that most of the Vista bashers have either not used it at all or gave it a 30 minute spin on their neighbor's computer or gave it a couple of mouse clicks at a store. Then, from their "vast" perspective, they start to expound. I do agree that for many XP users, there is no need to upgrade to Vista particularly those with a simple and well defined usage routine. For those who are willing to explore the additional capabilities and differences in Vista, it can enhance the usage experience quite a bit. One barrier that can get in the way is the need to run on adequate hardware and use the appropriate drivers and software. If these things are ignored, a user is likely to have an unhappy experience with a Vista upgrade. There are user applications where there really isn't sufficient justification to pay for a platform upgrade. Those are reasonable decisions to make. If someone has a older/slower PC that is sufficient for their usage applications, it would be a mistake to upgrade to Vista. That is a reasonable calculated decision that can make sense for some people. That is quite a bit different than the "Vista sucks" position that some of the blow-hards take.

With many things that are upgrades, extensions or enhancements to products already used, a user needs to examine things in light of the new capabilities and invest a little time to understand and use the new capabilities.

[Billf2099]

I upgraded to Windows 2000 from Windows 98 because software I needed to run was starting to not be available anymore in Win98. It was a nice upgrade but I think Windows 98 SP might have been the best OS M$ evermade. I finally bought an XP licence early this year when it became evident that I could not put music on my wife's IPOD because the newest IPODs refused to work with Windows 2000. I suppose there is some DRM BS associated with that because we all know that XP is 2000 with a different user interface and some of the bugs squashed. In other words not that big of a deal. The issue with Vista is people who adopted the OS the old fashioned way, IE bought computers with it on only to discover that their brand new computer ran slower and less reliably then their old computer they just replaced. That's the kind of performance that give quite a bit of negative buzz. As it turns out this can be traced to two different causes. 1. Often the machines in question did not have anywhere near enough memory in them. Really, how can someone state that a computer with 1 GB of memory is 'Vista'? Often machines like that only have two slots available, so this is a case where the hardware and software are not necessarily harmonious. 2. These machines were shipped with adware and bloatware and all of the other crap that machines are loaded with at the factory. In one example a laptop with the factory settings was tested and ran poorly, then the OS was reinstalled on a wiped hard drive with nothing but the OS and software necessary for the computer (IE, Office, etc) and the computer ran 33% better. So that tells you that computer assemblers carry part of blame for the criticism.
The history of windows says you never take their OS in the first year. Too many bugs. Windows 98 is nothing but Windows 95 with the bugs nearly completely obliterated. And I think maybe a fractional update on the underlieing DOS system. I disagree that Vista is a 'next generation'. There is plenty of recycled OS in Vista. It might be closer to difference between W98 and WME. And we know how well that ME thing worked out don't we? Vista was supposed to be something a lot closer to what Windows 7 is proported to be. A lot of the good that was supposed to be in Vista got removed. What remains is, sadly, a poor running fractional upgrade to XP that has bloatware in it. You can guess correctly that I will buy Vista ONLY if I have no other choice. I prefer to wait for Windows 7 to debut and then a decent time for the unpaid gamma testers to bitch the bugs out of that system.

[Dv8ted2]

It was a nice upgrade but I think Windows 98 SP might have been the best OS M$ evermade.

You to lost all credibility after that statement. 98 Second edition was unstable. If you breathed the wrong way, the operating system would fall to it's knees and take your programs with it.

It might be closer to difference between W98 and WME.

You are sadly misinformed. You are nowhere near the truth. You are trying to compare dos based operating systems with the NT core operating systems. They are not even in the same ballpark. ME was also viewed as a stopgap measure. Vista was a major overhaul. It gave you the server features that are in the client version. It has features such as previous versions. That was not available in either one of your dos comparisons.

What remains is, sadly, a poor running fractional upgrade to XP that has bloatware in it.

Another person that does not take the time to tweak his computer throws around the word bloated like it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

[JohnnyMalaria]

I disagree that Vista is a 'next generation'. There is plenty of recycled OS in Vista. It might be closer to difference between W98 and WME. And we know how well that ME thing worked out don't we? Vista was supposed to be something a lot closer to what Windows 7 is proported to be. A lot of the good that was supposed to be in Vista got removed. What remains is, sadly, a poor running fractional upgrade to XP that has bloatware in it. You can guess correctly that I will buy Vista ONLY if I have no other choice. I prefer to wait for Windows 7 to debut and then a decent time for the unpaid gamma testers to bitch the bugs out of that system.

To the lay person, perhaps it seems like a dressed-up minor upgrade of XP. But, under the hood there are many major differences that justify the major upgrade classification (i.e., from NT 5.1 to NT 6.0). For the most part, there is little difference - yet. As new applications come along, they will (guaranteed) begin to use those new features. I'm not going to list the differences. Anyone taking a stance on whether Vista is a major upgrade or not should do their homework to learn about the OS and not the GUI. Most people don't bother and their ignorance shines through. MS are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they created an OS that was entirely new, they would be crucified in the court of public opinion for breaking every application, hardware driver, etc etc. i.e., no backwards compatibility. That's the domain of a well-known but of little significance OS line.

[CogoSWSDS]

Reminds me of the good old days when Big Iron (IBM Mainframes) were king. You can take a COBOL program for MVS (370 architecture) and it will still run on IBM's OS/390 boxes as well as the z/OS boxes. The same cannot be said for Microsoft's operating systems, however. A program written for Windows 3.1 will probably work on Windows98, ME, but not 2000, XP, or Vista. IBM, when creating newer versions of their mainframes, has always had an eye for backward compatibility, right down to the machine code. The newest IBM z9 series mainframes still have instructions that were present in the old IBM/360 and 43xx series mainframes. Not so for the Wintel architecture.

HP, with their old HP 3000 computers, also had an eye out for backward compatibility. The same, unfortunately, has not been as successful for the Wintel architecture.

Having said that, generally, the improvements made to the Wintel architecture have been, by and large, good ones. It is inevitable that, at some point, I will get a new computer with a newer OS on it than XP, and I'll grow to like it as well as I have XP.

CogoSWSDS

[TBoneit]

It was a nice upgrade but I think Windows 98 SP might have been the best OS M$ evermade.

You to lost all credibility after that statement. 98 Second edition was unstable. If you breathed the wrong way, the operating system would fall to it's knees and take your programs with it.

It might be closer to difference between W98 and WME.

You are sadly misinformed. You are nowhere near the truth. You are trying to compare dos based operating systems with the NT core operating systems. They are not even in the same ballpark. ME was also viewed as a stopgap measure. Vista was a major overhaul. It gave you the server features that are in the client version. It has features such as previous versions. That was not available in either one of your dos comparisons.

What remains is, sadly, a poor running fractional upgrade to XP that has bloatware in it.

Another person that does not take the time to tweak his computer throws around the word bloated like it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

If your Win98 SE was unstable you had hardware or software problems. Our cash register runs Win98Se on a blazing PII 400Mhz with 32Mb Ram. It starts fast and loads the Register S/w Fast over the network and it shuts down fast and I never have to reboot it during the day. We run it for the legacy S/W that we aren't spending thousands to replace plus the H/W upgrades that would be needed.

Was 98Se the best OS? Needs minimal memory and processor to run well compared to Win2K, XP or Vista. It will connect to high speed internet and run word processing fine. Needs a small Hard drive for that.

At home I run XP on a Q6600. At work I run XP Pro or Vista Ultimate on a 4400+ dual core with 2Gb.

I still repair systems running DOS, Win3.11 and up for customers. They have the same reasons we run 98, they have old legacy S/W and in many cases ISA cards that would be very expensive to replace.

In my opinion XP is best. Whether or not that is because I have used it longer then Vista I can not say. Vista has been installed over a year. On the same hardware it runs things slower. It is prettier but so what.

[Dv8ted2]

It was a nice upgrade but I think Windows 98 SP might have been the best OS M$ evermade.

You to lost all credibility after that statement. 98 Second edition was unstable. If you breathed the wrong way, the operating system would fall to it's knees and take your programs with it.

It might be closer to difference between W98 and WME.

You are sadly misinformed. You are nowhere near the truth. You are trying to compare dos based operating systems with the NT core operating systems. They are not even in the same ballpark. ME was also viewed as a stopgap measure. Vista was a major overhaul. It gave you the server features that are in the client version. It has features such as previous versions. That was not available in either one of your dos comparisons.

What remains is, sadly, a poor running fractional upgrade to XP that has bloatware in it.

Another person that does not take the time to tweak his computer throws around the word bloated like it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

If your Win98 SE was unstable you had hardware or software problems. Our cash register runs Win98Se on a blazing PII 400Mhz with 32Mb Ram. It starts fast and loads the Register S/w Fast over the network and it shuts down fast and I never have to reboot it during the day. We run it for the legacy S/W that we aren't spending thousands to replace plus the H/W upgrades that would be needed.

Was 98Se the best OS? Needs minimal memory and processor to run well compared to Win2K, XP or Vista. It will connect to high speed internet and run word processing fine. Needs a small Hard drive for that.

At home I run XP on a Q6600. At work I run XP Pro or Vista Ultimate on a 4400+ dual core with 2Gb.

I still repair systems running DOS, Win3.11 and up for customers. They have the same reasons we run 98, they have old legacy S/W and in many cases ISA cards that would be very expensive to replace.

In my opinion XP is best. Whether or not that is because I have used it longer then Vista I can not say. Vista has been installed over a year. On the same hardware it runs things slower. It is prettier but so what.

The difference was that programs would run in the same memory space as the OS. If your resources were below about 80 percent, you were prone to crashing. In the NT world, programs were allowed their own memory space, so that if the program crashed, the opearating system would not blue-screen.

It is also not a good idea to use windows 98 on a cash register.

[JohnnyMalaria]

A program written for Windows 3.1 will probably work on Windows98, ME, but not 2000, XP, or Vista. IBM, when creating newer versions of their mainframes, has always had an eye for backward compatibility, right down to the machine code. The newest IBM z9 series mainframes still have instructions that were present in the old IBM/360 and 43xx series mainframes. Not so for the Wintel architecture.

That's fundamentally not true.

All current generation Intel and AMD processors can run any code written for a 8086 CPU. That's 30 years of backward compatibility at the machine code level.

Vista 32-bit can run 16-bit applications.

Many applications written for Win3.1 or Win9x will run on Win2000, WinXP and Vista.

Those that don't most often fail for the following reason:

They are programmed to directly access hardware (such as serial ports, video memory, disk controllers) etc. All the non-NT versions of Windows (i.e., consumer) permit this. It's dangerous.

The NT kernel is a different beast. It co-existed along side Win3.x and Win9x (as NT3.5, NT3.51 and NT4.0) - all rock solid. Eventually - and with much appreciation - MS ditched the non-NT consumer line and, since XP, only NT-based OSes have been introduced.

It is impossible to accommodate applications that attempt to make direct calls to hardware. It's not because of Windows. It's because of the processor. As soon as it detects an attempt, it refuses (and the OS correctly halts the program). Given that NT-based Windows is a completely different beast, the level of compatibility that MS have achieved is remarkable. Apple - in contrast - can't boast anything remotely like that. MS even deliberately do not fix known bugs in some modules because of the large amount of legacy software that has been written that would be broken (all Video for Windows applications are good examples).

Non-NT versions of Windows do not give an application its own private address space and instances of dlls etc. If one app makes a mistake, the entire OS crashes. Why on earth anyone can claim that the consumer versions of Windows were better is beyond me. I used Win3.1/3.11/95 because that's all I had access to. As soon as I could get NT4.0, I switched. I never bothered with Win98 (though I use it at work on a lab instrument - it's a pretty lowly OS by today's standards) and I had a brief encounter with Me on my first laptop. It was promptly replaced with Win2000. Of course, in a pinch, you can always dual boot if you have some legacy program that you must continue to use.

There's so much rose-tinted hindsight that goes on, it's baffling. Along with general FUD.

[SCDVD]

JohnnyMaleria, It's like a breath of fresh air to read your knowledgeable and well informed comments. It provides relief from some of the ignorant blow-hards and social mutants with Personality Deficit Disorder who have been opening their mouth and removing all doubt.

[MJPollard]

JohnnyMaleria, It's like a breath of fresh air to read your knowledgeable and well informed comments. It provides relief from some of the ignorant blow-hards and social mutants with Personality Deficit Disorder who have been opening their mouth and removing all doubt.

I'm assuming, of course, that you did not mean to imply that everyone who criticizes Vista is an "ignorant blowhard" or a "social mutant with Personality Defect Disorder." Nothing is immune from legitimate criticism, after all, and while there is plenty of knee-jerk, uninformed Vista bashing out there (and in here), it's also a fact that there are plenty of knowledgeable people who have more than a few brain cells to rub together, have used Vista extensively, and have amassed legitimate complaints and criticisms about the OS. Dismissing those people out of hand is a form of fanaticism that's no different than the knee-jerk bashers. I know you wouldn't stoop to doing that, of course, so I'm not concerned.