Lee

I’m one of the unlucky ones with incompatible device drivers (Sound Blaster Audigy 2, among others). Furthermore, while I guess I enjoy many of the security improvements the Microsoft engineers made to the operating system, some of them are actually slowing me down a bit too much in my work (I haven’t hit my learning curve with Vista yet, so I get frustrated working around some of them).

I agree with some of the other commenters. Better to wait and let Vista mature, and let third-party manufacturers “catch up” with device driver development for Vista.

Thanks,
Tim

Security is one of the biggest bonuses Microsoft promotes with Vista, which is not a single fix. Even if they plug all the holes, there are evil doers out there with a microscope looking for more holes to tear open.
Lets wait till Apple reaches 12% market share and have a look at the influence of popularity and the OS’s security then.

Windows Vista already is a very stable OS and will gain very soon popularity. But blame the OS manufacturer because the hardware manufacturer doesn’t have a driver ready in a period of 4 months. BS.

The real shame is that Vista represents nothing more than a “refresh,” really, and not the new paradigm that Microsoft has been promising for so many years. When feature after feature was deleted in the name of expediency, what we ended up with was a reskinned version of XP with some whizbang toys tied to the front.

I’m a Linux proponent, but I hate “M$ sux hur hur hur” crowing as much as the next person. However, I think that even though the market might not see it, the technical advantage that Microsoft once enjoyed has been considerably narrowed. Microsoft hasn’t really added anything to Vista that Linux hasn’t had for years now—its advantage lies in its significantly larger application pool and mindshare.

I’ve tried it on my crumbly old laptop, my uber desktop, and my medium Media Center PC, and it’s performed better than XP across the board. It’s pretty, surprisingly functional when you get to grips with it, and features quite a large number of handy features.

Also, it’s difficult to understand how Vista’s compatibility can be knocked, when it’s the vendors themselves that need to produce newer drivers. Given that Vista won’t be available to consumers until the end of January, most vendors won’t have drivers available just yet – why should they?

It seems incredibly fashionable to diss Microsoft – the various Linux distros and OS X versions floating about represent the underdog, and we all know the Internet loves an underdog – but I really wish someone would give them credit where it’s due.

That said, they could release the Home Basic version for virtually nothing, and make their money from upgrades to more fully featured versions; that would give them a tasty slice of positive PR.