When are they going to get it into their thick heads that Vista and 7 are THE SAME "LIFTED" THING! Windows 7 is going to be a better release because it is Vista after a few years of bug fixing and driver maturity, but it is exactly the same OS.

The important differences - DX11 etc are already available to Vista, the dumbing down of UAC for XP loving luddites thankfully never will be.

The problem Vista faced was Dell and other crappy OEM's that fill the OS with crud and under-speccing it before shipping it off to customers. No wonder people weren't happy.

TBF, M$ were a big part of that too

Companies should be force to state the minimum spec needed (yes they do now but its not the real minimum (Vista should have said 2gb RAM) and manufactures forced to build PC's to this.

because they're not?



totally agree on that front

The biggest problem was that a lot of manufacturers decided they could gouge their (now ex-)customers for more money by stopping support for existing hardware and software.

Like XP, Windows Vista was first good after a service pack - SP1 in this case, XP needed the second SP before it was considered stable enough for many. But there are so many users who have grown up on XP and not used anything else that moving to something new and better was a bit of a culture shock. For older hands and new users, there was nothing wrong with Vista.

Having moved through about 40 different operating systems and versions over the years, Vista was clearly a huge step forward over XP, if your hardware supported it. But the forums and press managed to pretty much kill Vista beyond any chance of recovery.

Windows 7 couldn't have used the Vista name, no matter how good it had become.

Windows 7 is a lot like Snow Leopard, it is a refinement of what went before, a lot of improvement under the hood, although the taskbar makever is long overdue and the new Dockesque Taskbar is brilliant... Now it just needs a constant menu bar across the top of the screen

In my opinion, Microsoft should stop all of this nonsense. Apple have the right idea here, the disk you get with your computer contains a pretty much unmodified copy of the current release of Mac OS, I presume it then includes some things like specific drivers for the model you've just bought.

Why does HP/Dell/Acer/at al insist on bundling their own Wi-Fi manager with Windows? Why must you have demo versions of this that and everything else? It's not needed. Why don't they include a proper copy of the OS, rather than lowering hard drive space by putting a recovery partition in?

Yes but they pressured Microsoft into going for the con. They were all culpable.

I think it's to do with the fact that margins on PCs are tiny. So they are paid by the software companies to have all the crud bundled in to help with their cashflow.

I agree with the WiFi manager bit. Yesterday we had a rep from a support company come in. We have a wireless box that connects out to the internet and bypasses our LAN. The Intel wireless software kept asking for an ownership key which can only be numeric not the WPA key. I switched it to use Windows to manage the WiFi connections and it connected perfectly.