I really HATE it how Microsoft got rid of the classic style menus in Vista. With Word I wasted so much time, trying to find out what did what and where it was. I found a company in USA who has released a 7-day trial of the classic Windows menus and this is so brilliant I purchased it. If you hate Vista and like the classic menus, I thoroughly recommend this. Can be found at
http://www.accmsoft.com/index.html

My flatmate has a new Laptop with Vista Home on it. Intel Dual Core with Igb RAM - Its a slug - really slow. You even get the flashing blue circle while you wait for it to display the program menu.. This is before you've started any programs. We made it slightly quicker by turning off all the bling, so it has the old XP lookalike interface. Her desktop machine is a 4yr old Compaq with Athlon XP2400 and 256mb RAM & Kubuntu 7.04 - its positively snappy compared to the new laptop.

How do you make your old PC go like a new Vista one? Remove half the RAM and underclock the cpu...

This is nonsense. I have used Vista Ultimate on my T43 Thinkpad for more than 6 months and it works beautifully for almost everything. I agree with the exit from sleep comment; it is sometimes slow to resume from standby, but overall Vista is damn good and an excellent improvement over XP (which I still have at work and have used heavily in the past). Cheers.

I client of mine recently had a damaged 5 year old laptop replaced on by his insurance company. They gave him a new Acer with Vista on it. It has a dualcore processor and 1gb of ram. The owner called me wondering if there was any way to speed it up as it was just as slow as his old 900mhz/256mb/XP lappy. The thing should be really snappy, but because of the pile of bloatware called Vista it runs like mollassis in winter...

It is unfortunate that Mr. Louderback felt compelled to wait until he had resigned as editor of PC Magazine before he dared criticize Vista. Many of us rely on the opinions published by periodicals like PC Magazine. I appreciate their reluctance (from a business standpoint) to criticize MS, but I think their first loyalty should be to their readers - not their advertisers.

If Microsoft (or anyone) has produced a less than satisfactory product, they should say that - not pretend that all is well, or that problems will probably soon be fixed with a major update. Is that not the fundamental purpose of publications like PC Magazine?

I've used Microsoft products since 1980... and Vista is the worst than can be even imagined. The best description I recently saw was that "at 50 million lines of code, Vista could well be the longest suicide note in history."

I'd agree with that.

I use fedora core 7 but my wife, bless, uses VISTA. Its a curious thing. She hasnt really had any issues at all. I will say one thing though. She has never patched it, and she has never installed ANY non MS software. That way it all seems to work ok. Its a bit slow for the machine I got her. I would have thought it could go a little quicker. Upside to vista... well Its not windows me.