I baught Ultimate for my home machine. Don't think I will do it again. Home Premium will be my next choice and if I really need Ultimate - I can just do the inplace upgrade.

My home machine is contstantly improved as the bug fixes have been released, especially the 2 big fies from August. ITunes now performs on par with, and in general it's smoother.

My boss at work has had all sorts of trouble with Vista - much like the days in Windows 2000. I think he should have waited for SP1 to upgrade. I won't run Vista on my work machine until SP1 - I don't want to waste my time. Sorry MS - Vista is good enough for home, but not yet ready for business.

Well, I think Windows Vista can be summed up in the following story.

Went home for the holidays and my brother's (he is 21 and more PC literate than the average user) PC was trashed as usual. I had to do the usual format, re-install everything all day long routine which I have been doing every time I go back home over the past few years.

I tell him Windows Vista is out and that I'd be installing that rather than XP. He said he didn't care as long as it worked.

I get everything up and working for him and after a few hours he sits down on his PC. No more than 30 minutes go by and he comes over asking me to take Windows Vista off his machine and put Windows XP back. I asked him why and he said that everything was slower and some of this stuff didn't work (2GB RAM, 3GHz CPU, 320GB SATA HD, nVidia 7800GTX, etc decept spec machine.). I tell him to relax and that he just needs to get used to things. An hour later he tells me that Vista definitely has to go.

I want to see for myself what he is talking about and he was absolutely right. Average game performance was down by 40% across the board (both DirectX and OpenGL) no matter which version of the nVidia drivers I tried out. His web cam and gaming wheel did not work even though the drivers were supposed to support Vista. Just opening up a new instance of Windows Explorer took a considerable amount of time more than it did in Windows XP.

Faced with all these problems I searched, but could not find a single argument to convince him to keep Vista, so I unistalled it and put Windows XP back on (another day of my holiday's wasted).

I had vista on my laptop and although I had some bluetooth issues, it wasn't a bad OS. My problem was the forced adoption stance MS took with DirectX10 for gamers. I have a Dx10 card, but still on XP because some of the games I did play took a big hit when moving to Vista on my gaming rig so I went back. I probably won't be purchasing any Dx10 games until an xp hack is out, just to spite MS trying to force me to Vista on that machine.

I've been running Vista in one form or another since the first TAP builds and really haven't suffered any problems that I'd consider "deal-breakers" for me since it went gold. Yes, I have had my share of driver issues - but my problems have generally been with trying to use some of my older peripherals (> 4 years) with Vista, and I haven't really had that many headaches getting my "modern" components to work. Even my 64-bit experience has been satisfactory for the most part (although you definitely must have "fresh" hardware before heading down that path).

I guess what I am saying is that consumers need to be aware that Vista comes with some pretty demanding hardware requirements and your mileage may vary if you try running it on older equipment (Microsoft's minimum hardware requirements for running Vista are ludicrous by the way - don't run it on anything less than 2 gigs of RAM). Anyone wishing to upgrade to Vista needs to be prepared to upgrade their hardware as well - expecting it to work well with all of your tired old hardware is probably a bit unreasonable. Microsoft has not done a very good job of this in my opinion, and I'm guessing that a lot of the Vista bashing probably originates from those that tried to upgrade existing XP or *gasp* Windows 2000 PCs.

Personally, my biggest disappointment with Vista has definitely been with the "Ultimate" SKU. I use a personal domain at home to manage the 7 PCs on our family network. This means that any Vista machines on my net have to be running either the Business or Ultimate SKUs in order to participate in the domain. Obviously the reduced "casual time" capabilities of the Business SKUs make them inadequate for home use, so I really don't have any choice but to step up to Ultimate on these machines when Home Premium would do for all but the one we use as our main Media Center machine (which may get eventually replaced with WHS but that's a different story). Given Microsoft's failure to deliver on any decent extras for Ultimate, I really feel that I am getting totally ripped off for the "Ultimate" price I have to pay to get the simple domain membership capabilities that are crippled in the Home SKUs. What is so precious about domain networking features that Microsoft insists on disabling those options for the home "enthusiast" user? They did it with MCE and now with Vista. Network domains are not limited to business users, and I could really live without the other Ultimate "extras" Microsoft has delivered to date (LOL) if they'd just include a fully functioning network stack in the Home Premium edition.

Sadly, it is a valid comparison from my perspective too.

WinNT was always a reliable workhorse OS that became more feature rich and stable with each SP and easy to use with W2000's addition of PnP and XPPro's extensions of that.

Vista feels more like the old Wintenndo slur applied to the 95/98/Me systems with an OS released before maturity and geared towards casual users with its game support and OS-X type of interface icons.

As an example, I purchased a new Vista pre-installed Compaq laptop. With a slow bootup (low powered machine) the sleep/hibernate was the logical choice to avoid wait times. However, the built-in wireless doesn't work after sleep/hibernate. It seems that while this worked fine in Beta2 and Beta3, a low-level driver was changed before RTM that was problematic. I emailed and called MSFT on the phone and eventually got the one single hotfix that was suppossed to fix the problem, and it just made it an intermittent one. The other hotfixes that are suppossed to help the one hotfix I am somehow privledged to have (remember when anyone could just FTP down any hotfix?) are not available because the policy dictated that I was to wait for SP1 to be released.

That and a couple other issues does not feel like a "lets get some work done in your business" attitude but instead more of a "be patient and wait for the next release, your stuff isn't important" type of attitude from the policies in place. If its someone waiting to install the latest DirectX driver for the latest whatever game, I understand the attitude. But when it has a direct impact on business and hinders functionality available in the old product, it doesn't seem like great business sense for a vendor to have that attitude.

Microsoft did ship Dreamscene today but said the Language packs were not coming any time soon. They also made some excuses and promises for new Extras but no details yet.

http://windowsultimate.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2007/09/25/windows-dreamscene-released.aspx

You know, I didn't start reading your blog until recently (Honestly!), but I found this post especially funny. Why? Because a week later, going by the dates, I blogged almost the same thing.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only .NET and general MSFT advocate who feels less than enthusiastic about win ME.

http://community.irritatedvowel.com/blogs/pete_browns_blog/archive/2007/09/28/Will-Vista-be-Remembered-like-Windows-ME_3F00_.aspx

Pete