But I think Vista is still a good move now as it's got a lot of what windows 7 will have, as Ed commented the driver model is in place and so on. Truely, nobody could argue Vista has done greatly, but at the same time I don't think you can argue it was because the OS is horrible. The OEMs were so far from being ready for Vista it boggles my mind. Even if MS changed specs to some degree at some point, which i don't know for sure, it was a debaucle. The Intuit example still shines as the best. The most popular 3rd party software would not run on Vista with it's 2006 version. Why? Well, since they got a 2007 version out fairly quickly after consumer release of Vista, I think the answer is quite obvious.
So, to blame Microsoft or to "come down" on them makes no sense. they delivered on security big time. And if anyone's memory serves, that was THE biggest knock against Windows for years. I think they should be given a thumbs up for not ditching the effort and end up with a glorified XP. That would have been much worse and everyone is aware of that, i know that, but if you read many blogs you'd think Microsoft had no clue. They were instead taking a huge step forward and it had the chance for mixed results all along. The completely change your security model for both apps and drivers was a bold move by Microsoft.
Those who hate them can not find enough bad to say, but all i know is i've been using Vista Ultimate x64 since early this years and I absolutely love it. No problems. The thing is Vista needs a lot of RAM. In fact you won't notice much of any change moving from the last core 2 duo model at 2.2Ghz, for example, to a penryn model at 2.5Ghz. That is for average use and i'm not speaking for processor intensive apps such as CAD programs.
RAM is so cheap now that the idea that Vista "costs too much in hardware" is misguided either purposely or otherwise.
You can get a core 2 duo machine for 1,000.00 now that will run Vista like a champ, especially if you put 60.00 more into it and snag 4 GB of high quality RAM. Of course that would only be worthwhile for a 64 bit version of Vista. 32 bit Vista will run on 2GB of RAM quite well, but bump it to 3GB and you'll be happy.
And what's not to like? I don't care if the new UI is the only thing I gained since I love it over XP's GUI. But as a former full time programmer and now only programming hobbyist essentially, I find many very valuable reasons I like Vista on top of the new UI, but it seems I'm all on my own with that.
I've found WAN speeds to be dramatically better. Program stability under high load is outstanding. Memory management, at first looks like Vista is a major resource hog, but it's not and you can change how it handles memory if you decide. But it's designed to learn what you use most. If I look at my memory usage, using default settings, it is using around 1 GB of the 4 GB. But if i then load Office Access, Excel, Infopath, OneNote, Outlook, Powerpoint, Project, publisher, Visio, Word and Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, my memory usage has barely budged. It's simply reserving memory for often used apps. Between that and super prefetch, it gets faster and faster over time.
With hardware getting better and faster by the day, Vista will be be on 300 million desktops by the end of this year.
