I've had no personal contact with Vista, having been warned off while it was still in beta.

However, everyone (about a half-dozen fellows) with whom I regularly communicate, and who have had contact with VISTA experess frustration. The typical "intended for useful work" configuration is with a >3 GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM, and an equally huge HDD (>400GB). Every one of these guys complains that VISTA's seldom yielding performance as perceived by the user as greater than 25% the speed of their previous machine which had a < 2GHz CPU with 512 MB of RAM and a 100-200 GB HDD.

Now, these are guys who pay to get performance, and, for the most part, they've breathed a sigh of relief at the fact that the machines they bought came with install/recovery DVD's so they could flush the HDD and install XP so they could get some performance. A couple of them have tried FEDORA with some success. I guess it depends on what you're doing.

Sadly, I've heard NOT ONE good thing said about the new VISTA OS, except that it's more costly in both software and hardware, that many applications that worked fine under '98 and XP don't work properly any longer, and that most of their old DOS programs are either totally useless or severely crippled. Thta means they have to buy something more. This is all good for M$ and the software vendors, but, as I've said many times, what's good for some is ill for others.

Governments around the world have refused to switch and ours, for example, has ordered a hold on all PC acquisitions until the OS question is resolved. Since Fedora and, even better, UBUNTU, have come on the scene, together with MSOffice-workalikes capable of creating and interpreting MSOffice-compatible files, there appears to be little motivation to buy VISTA due to its much greater demands of hardware. The government is also concerned about the built-in security holes that allow M$ and others to verify that your copies of VISTA, etc, are legit, and, thereby, allows anyone who can grok out those security loopholes unrestricted access to your computer and its data.

Several years ago, we found that LINUX runs DOS app's much better/faster than WINDOWS, and that LINUX runs its versions of the same software, where it's available, faster and more with fewer quirks and foibles than Windows.

It looks as though M$ has shifted their focus from PC's to game boxes, where there's still a very substantial market to exploit, as opposed to the dwindling PC hardware market.

I think the M$ guys have stumbled on this one.

RE