In the 5 months she had it before meeting me she had lost all her data twice and been on the telephone with HP support for a total of 14 hours over 4 days. The machine had a shelf life of 5 hours. That's right, it would run for about 5 hours before locking up hard. The only way to recover was to cycle the power. This is with no applications other than what it shipped with.

I put 64 bit Ubuntu GNU/Linux on the machine and it screams! She's using OpenOffice.org for her office productivity, Firefox 3.0 w/nspluginwrapper to enable the 32 bit version of Flash. Thunderbird for email where she can keep all three of her IMAP email addresses concurrently in one place.

She's said goodbye and good riddance to proprietary software and all the viruses, adware, spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, etc… in her life. We are happy campers.

Vista sucks… NOW. Give it 3-4 months. They'll have all the bugs worked out soon, and Mac will once again prove to just be a silly fad followed by the masses (i.e. sheep). Anyone with vision will not solely switch to a single platform.

I hate Java programmers like I hate VB programmers.

It might rival Windowz ME.

As many of you will recall, this OS was supposed to really turn the corner for MS.

It was supposed to do away with a lot of the old legacy frameworks and crap (DCOM, COM, COM+, etc) and migrate to a new .NET-framework driven platform using the new WinFS filesystem. The file system would leverage the SQL Server database for storage indexing.

As a result of unexpected delays and a burning profit concern, MS eliminated the MOST of the benefits and new features of VISTA so as to finally make their re-revised release date. What did users get?

1) Avalon – the new presentation/UI…which frankly, looks like a cludgey version of Apple Leopard.

2) small changes to security and user roles

3) some new backoffice/management hooks enabling easier maintenance and updates (I/T use)

4) some newbie wizards to support tasks that most of us have learned to do manually over the years.

If this list seems underwhelming – IT SHOULD. The fact that these elements came as a new release rather than a service pack is indeed insulting and demonstrates how deep in the sand the marketing folks in Redmond have their heads. It is nothing short of appalling that MSFT wants to shut off support on XP and "migrate" us all to Vista. Why? it's not like there's a compelling benefit.

No one with any sense will buy (and use) this O/S. I could open up a side business uninstalling Vista and putting XP on new machines.

I've done it no less than a dozen times in the past 60 days.

When will someone in Redmond wake up? As it is, I only run Windowz (Server 05, Server 2k, and XP) in VMWare Fusion (via my Mac). I can't see going back.

Now you're left with a 1% market share for those specifically ordering Vista. Which puts Vista market share wise at a par with Linux and far behind OS X.

I'm part of the 91% figure.why? because I purchased my two computers with Windows installed(and erased them,and created a virtual machine with windows but I don't use it more than 2 hours/month).

Of course, you wish for your own platform choice to remain dominant but real competition will benefit _you_. You get more features, more security, faster development cycles for less money out of your pocket. You also get a heterogenous environment that means fewer virus makers targeting just you.

You should be shouting Go Mac Go! Until they get too much market, at which point you can safely switch sides.