paganizer's Journal: The morality of working with Vista

I've been in one field or the other of computer oriented support and/or operating since 1987; Over the years I've made myself familiar with most commonly used operating systems, from DOS to Solaris to OS/2 to Slackware to Windows 2000.
One of the ways I've done this with Microsoft products is by being a MSDN member, and getting and testing Alpha's & Beta's of the various releases; That's why I was was pushing OS/2 Warp over Win95, condemned them before it came out for WinME, and was pretty darned happy when Windows 2000 was released.
I steered people away from XP as long as I could, until it became apparent that Win2k was not going to be easily available; Luckily SP2 for XP had been released by then, and XP (or, as I like to think of it, Win2k Plus! pak with DRM!!!) was usable.
I retired a few years ago, but still support some old customers; today I got my 2nd ever support request for Vista (Help! my DVD drive won't read CD's!).
I've done my due diligence on Vista, and it is a pure crapfest of epic proportions; I doubt seriously that any amount of service packs will ever make it usable.
My first thought was just to tell them they screwed themselves, but then I suggested that they take it back to the place they bought it each and every time they had a problem.
The long winded prelude leads to this: What is the best way to deal with Vista? Would the best course be to try to fix it's myriad problems, or to try to do something that would fix the problem that Vista is?

Vista? First you get some matches...

[Wyvern2005]

then a can of gasoline...then you burn the dvd and download a copy of SUSE linux for yourself and forget that Windose exists....
      Lisa

  There's only one real cure for stupidity.....

Vista on a Laptop

[Shadow Wrought]

One of the guys I work had Vista on his laptop. Unfortunately he lost his password for it, and couldn't find any way to recover it. Tech support was out of ideas, and he was at his wits end. At last he was able to get a copy of XP back from the vendor and I used Knoppix to copy all of his work files off the HD. Then he put XP back on it (since he hated Vista anyway). I dread the day the officewide upgrade takes place. *shudder*

For myself I've been learning Linux and FreeBSD and, while they are not w