The ow! is now.
Yeah.. Vista’s bad reputation is totally unjustified. The thing about Windows is that I have mixed emotions about it, as most true geeks probably do. My first computer had windows and back then I used to enjoy the little tingle of anticipation I felt every time I pressed the power button on my AT tower and wondered whether the drivers for my Yamaha sound card would load and when they didn’t (very often) I enjoyed the tinkering involved. Also back then you couldn’t just look on ‘teh internets’ for the answer. I wouldn’t get my first 33.6 kbps modem for another couple of years, so when you fixed stuff you were actually figuring things out and learning and expanding your brain.
Those were fun days, days when a driver update for your 1 MB PCI graphics card would make a huge difference. How huge ? Well one update I will always remember took mpeg videos on my PC from a sequence of tiny blocks with a soundtrack to an actual video where I could make out people dancing. This was, for someone like myself, the closest thing to an epiphany (The religious kind, not the Chaka Khan compilation) But even so, that shit got old fast and in a few years I just wanted a computer that worked. That, for me was/is the problem with Windows. You seem to spend more time actually taking care of the system (Update the virus definitions, install drivers, scan for Trojans, etc) than you actually spend getting on with what you really want to do on it. That and bloat, make it faster and lighter, more of a Lotus and less of a Buick. But that never happened and that is why Microsoft has this huge flaming turd of an OS now.
Steve Ballmer, eat my shorts.