athloi's Journal: Actually, Vista works

I'm a Windows XP and FreeBSD user. The only thing I won't use is a Mac, because the Macintosh user community, as a group, behaves like a pretentious snot and I don't want to be associated with it. I think I like Windows XP okay for desktop software, but anything server-ish and most development tasks I prefer to do on the BSD box. Desktop and server really are two completely different worlds.

Today's conventional wisdom, based on more than a year's worth of relentless negative publicity, says Vista is hopelessly broken. In fact, my experience says the exact opposite is true. I proved the point in the first installment of this series, where I restored a sluggish $2500 Sony Vaio notebook to peak performance in a few hours. And I think anyone with a modicum of PC smarts can do the same.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=437

I think he's right. I've now used several Vista machines, and to his assessment, I'd add this: Vista is designed to drive adoption of new hardware and abandoning of the old. This will benefit us all as industry finally adapts to the newer paradigms, including how we're going to really take advantage of multicore chips. But, get yourself a fast machine with 2-4 gb of RAM for Vista.