Windows Vista: A Good Deal Better Than Techno-Seppuku
I built a new PC from scratch over the weekend (for the geeklings interested it's an Intel E8400, 8800GT, Gigabyte X38-DS4 with a terabyte of drive space and 8 gigs of ram...yes I'm sexy.), and finally upgraded to Windows Vista. In fact I supposedly engaged in absolute sado-masochism by embracing the 64 bit version.
Reading the commentary of my tech blogging brothers and sisters (as well as opinions in mags like Maximum PC) I expected the experience to be akin to technological seppuku. A year of pretty much constant hand wringing and tsk-tsk-tsking by techies had me ready to experience my first operating system root canal meets arctic silver enema.
But other than some annoyances trying to get AHCI/Raid drivers installed and some early problems with network transfer speeds (hot fixable), the OS seems solid. A lot of this is because I'm running it on a PC that would think Hal had a learning disability, but still -- it runs every app and the fastest games without slowdown. And it's purty.
In all, Vista is a good deal better than plunging a sword into your digestive tract.
I think you need a decent PC to run it (don't fling it at your 1999 HP piece of shit and expect Jesus to appear), and I think it was wise to wait for the initial headaches to be cured (iPod syncing for x64 was only resolved just last week), but I think at this point in Vista's life-cycle it's about time for some techno-pundits to stop pretending the OS is the technological equivalent of mainlining Drain-o.