Unfortunately I have to agree with the naysayers. I've never been an anti-MS guy, but Vista has seriously damaged their rep with me. I'll give you a short list of the bad issues, but 1st one admittedly cool feature. They have included a feature that will allow you to use a now-a-days dirt cheap flash drive as RAM on your box. Need a little more RAM to speed up your box, or just to run some particular big footprint program? No problem, plug in a 2 or 4gig or whatnot Flashdrive and you just added that much RAM, very cool. But unfortunately brings to light the first bad issue.
1-HUGE resource hog. There are on the order of 10 times as many running processes with Vista as compared to XP, already a top-heavy OS. Moreover you cannot disable many of them without having the OS shut down because it assumes you are doing something illicit. So your gonna need that extra RAM.
2-MS is seriously in bed with the folks who keep suing file sharers. In and of itself no big deal, I use legal software, but they have left themselves backdoors into your box, and reportedly also backdoors specifically for the government and the filesharing sue happy folks(questionable). Again, same as above, disable it and the OS will shut you down.
3-The hardware permissions keys now officially registered in Vista mean that 1)any changes to your box at all, including unsigned drivers may disable the OS, and 2)if a hacker messes with for instance the chipset for you soundcard, MS will disable that chipset across the board until they come up with a fix for it, ignoring the fact that you have done nothing wrong at all.
Thats just a couple of bigguns, the fact that MS reserves the right to snoop in your box, and disable hardware at their whim is enough for me to not upgrade. Honestly, several of these points and a few others that aren't well documented yet seem downright illegal, and I'll be surprised if there isn't a class action lawsuit in the near future over it.
I have to say, I've never been one to beat up on MS for all the stuff most people do, anti-competition etc, I think they have with a few notable exceptions been smart with adopting new tech from other sources and putting it in a relatively stable and user friendly environment. But on this I feel seriously let down.
Like bill-G said, don't take my word for it, go to any tech website and check it out, even the ones who want to like it are upset.
Syn
