Take your pick: are you contented with a handful of 'happy meal' level reasons to like Vista, or a well researched, scientifically based thesis from a computer scientist explaining why you should avoid Vista at all costs?

Your call what you are happy to base your decisions on, but I would check out: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html before deciding to buy Vista if I was you.

OK...

Microsoft CANNOT make new version of Windows every couple of years like Apple can. First of all, there are far more business users of Windows than Mac. Why does this matter? Many large businesses do not want to spend the time and money to upgrade thousands of computers every couple of years. Throw in indirect costs like training, and it's easy to see that Microsoft won't make a new OS every couple of years.

Second of all, when's the last time you made your way to Best Buy (or Newegg) to buy a new graphics card, processor, and motherboard for your Mac? Oh yes, you can't. What about for your homemade Mac, one you made from all the components you bought. Right, forgot that you can't do that. Microsoft must test their software to ensure acceptable compatibility amongst the thousands and thousands of hardware pieces available for PCs. Apple can be more rapid with their Mac OS releases because they keep an enormously tight control on the hardware used. They don't need to deal with crappy 3rd-party drivers or other such sources for crashes as much as Microsoft does.

I stiil laugh when I see Micro$soft... What's up with the $? I find this funny coming from some of the Mac-fanatics given how Macs TEND to be more expensive than PCs (for equivalent parts). Maybe I should say I don't want any Mac$.

Of course hardware requirements would be higher with Vista than previous versions... Computers have gotten progressively faster and more powerful since the release of XP, so wouldn't you expect the new version of Windows to utilize that power? Couldn't you equally say "Man, why I can't I run this on my PC with a 486 50mhz processor, 4mb RAM, and a 50mb hard drive... It ran Windows 3.1 just fine, so why the high requirements for Vista?"... Oy. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade... If you don't want to upgrade because the requirements aren't met on your PC, then don't upgrade.

I wish we were all more reasonable about this. Without Microsoft, the computing industry would not be as far along as it is now. Regardless of whether or not you hate Microsoft, it's tough to deny that they played a massive role in computing advancements (and getting computers "to the masses"). I'm NOT saying Microsoft is the best company in the world, but it's foolish to think they're the worst.

P.S. -- I can go to a Mac review site now and find several front-page articles about how great some Mac products are... Wouldn't you expect some pro-MS reviews on a site called pcworld.com?

If we upgrade to Windows Vista wil we still be able to use our Windows programs and games?

Wrong.The most you can say is that there + might+ be a reason why PCs have a large market share.

This conclusion follows from Brian Arthur's economic analysis of the 1980s VHS / Beta video tape wars. See this Scientific American article:
[url]http://www.item.ntnu.no/fag/SIE5070/2007/sciam.pdf_.

Arthur showed that two competing, but incompatible products, that are subject to positive sales feedback (i.e. if one of the products gets even the tiniest advantage in market share, then even more people will buy that product) can produce any split of the target market, from 0% : 100% to 100% : 0% or any other value x% : (100 - x)% in between. Furthermore the outcome can be explained by nothing more than chance.

So the current PC / Mac market split is completely consistent with chance. There is no reason to believe that there is any rational reason why PCs have -- let alone "command"! -- a large market share.

While every GUI owes a debt to Xerox Parc, remember that Apple paid Xerox with a large chunk of Apple stock. Microsoft did not.

Also the GUI argument is the superficial side of deeper issues. A good GUI really has to be built using an object oriented language, so that the GUI can respond to the state of the machine. (You can hack around the problem, as Microsoft did with Windows 95, but that's no real solution.) Xerox used SmallTalk. Apple +invented +and developed the object oriented extensions of Pascal that appeared Object Pascal. The MacOS was written in (tweaked) Object Pascal.

The argument that Apple and Microsoft have - or had - some kind of parity of evil is just false. Until at least 1995 Apple was a truly innovative company, whereas Microsoft was more like a leech.

Microsoft's success in the '85-'95 period was buoyed by its association with the IBM PC, their use of dedicated, but limiting, text-based graphics cards which made IBM PCs popular with secretaries and data entry people. These factors inflated the value of Microsoft's ancient DOS system, and made it a commercial rival to Apple's GUI. I suspect MS won because of the VHS/Beta effect that I mentioned ealier.

MS's work after 1995 - namely Windows NT and its successors - resulted from a major collaboration with IBM (OS/2). If IBM had not made this mistake, I suspect we'd have an Apple/IBM race today, and MS wouldn't exist.

(That is the first post I've written about Apple and Microsoft in five years, and I don't ever plan to write another. History isn't that interesting to me.)

i got it, and i like it, its got a bit of a learning curve but other than that, its smooth. And a resource hog........... to sit idle at the desktop......40 % of ram is used

I have to wonder why the Mac and Linux supporters are always posting negative comments in here? If your product is so great why waste time here?