Yeah, even I will admit that the first round of notebooks we had with Vista
had 512 Ram on some of them, and even single core processors, now if you
come to our store about 90% of the systems with Vista have 2 Gigs RAM and
dual cores are minimum now.
It may be that after 20 months that not that many people have chosen to
bring their Vista machines in, instead just swapping them out for XP boxes
(since you can't downgrade most of them (no XP drivers)), or dare I hope,
Linux, but I've been on Vista at my other job and at home since almost day
1, and my experiences are mostly positive.
As for being forced to buying Vista, there are Apples out there, take a look
around, I would not hesitate to recommend an Apple to ANYONE, they are great
machines, but the people who use them can be arrogant pricks, but the
machines are still good. Customer also said to me, well if Microsoft is
"forceing" us to use Vista, they must have a fair amount of confidence in
the OS. I mean if Microsoft didn't think Vista was good enough for the
general public, I don't think it would be the only choice for mainstream
consumers. right? Oh wait, it's not, there's Apple and Linux.
I actually GOT a virus on my Vista box at work (General9.ACLM, damn porn
sites). I was able to remove it with McAfee (Enterprise version) with little
to NO effort on my part. Didn't even have to boot into safe mode. Virus kept
triggering UAC, and McAfee kept it in check.
If no one is using Vista, then why are so many people bitching about it? If
you figure less than 10% (high figure) of people could be having problems,
then damn there are a lot of people out there doing just fine.
Take a class, get some training. Community Colleges are a great place to
start. Yesterday I downloaded SP1 RTM (just hit bittorrent for those of you
without scruples), but I haven't put it through it's paces yet. Can't wait,
hoping some of the minor annoyances are cleared up.
-A.