DJ, I was used to Vista and then Compaq screwed me and pirated my software. Both Compaq and MicroSoft turned their back to me so now I type on a MacBook!
I got to rethinking the question and came to this simple conclusion. Just like ANY operating system, there are learning periods. I have 4 desktops, 1 with vista, 3 w/XP and 1 of those has Linux (thanks to my 11 year old). 2 Laptops, 1xp, 1vista. Granted, having different flavors of users and differ OS's, it keeps me on my toes. Sometimes, I feel like I'm back on the ship or at TRACEN dealing with all the questions and issues that they can cause sometimes. But over all, I'm sorta glad Vista has been a pain in the rear. It has FORCED me to learn that newer isn't always better, if it's not broke, leave it the hell alone (something I've learned many times over but keep pushing it). I just had a XP FORCE me to re-register it just because 2 weeks ago, I added a new video card (at least all registry changes lead to that) so by far, the easiest OS version I found to deal with was 98se. XP is ok but my vista PC's both have lots of ram, lots of processor power to make it run pretty good. Out of a 1-5 scale of "windows performance" that vista will display, everything on my one PC is 5.2 or 5.9. Only my graphics (still shopping for the one special video card) sucks (3.5). It's using onboard video. I think for those who don't like to "tinker", MAC's are the way to go. But, being the back yard mech I am, I love to pop the hood, tweak here and there and blow it up just to start all over. So , I go with Microsoft OS's and stick with PC's. MAC's have their little sad faces when things go wrong, windows has it's blue screen of death. As I'm becoming a more seasoned Vista user, I'm happy with it's performance though I'm sure I can get a faster machine with XP, but I'll loose some of those "nice" things that come with Vista. My machine is a Gateway w/ 4gb ram, 500gb drive x2, AMD 64 x2 Live 5000+ processor with a 2000mhz buss speed. It’s not a slouch and it opens bloatware office 2007 like it's notepad (fast) and even opens my video software in seconds as compared to XP on a p4 2.4ghz w/HT and 1.5gb of ram which takes 3 minutes to load.
Sorry for the rant, slow night at work, working solo and thought I would share my bumps and lumps. I have nothing against MAC's, just I'm not willing to jump ship because I don't want to learn something new. And I’m used to Microsofts BS “lets check to see if your running a genuine copy of WINDOWS every time I crack the case.
