I have been using Vista for about a year now on a computer I built wth an eye to using Vista. The choices are not the best now, but they wern't bad at the time.

I have an Antec 900 case (still a good choice), a PC Power & Cooling silent 850 power supply (still a good choice), a DFI Infinity 3200 board (would choose an Asus if I did it again, an AMD Athalon 64 X2 6000, 4 gig of Corsair memory, 3 Western Digital 350 Gig hard drives and the usual CD DVD memory card rteaders. I also have 2 Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro 512 video in Cross Fire. The last was probably an over kill, but not bad a year ago. i was very careful to get the latest drivers. I had a problem with the first installation which was interrupted by a knee repalcement. I reinstalled from scratch and installed all the updates after installing Trend Micro Internet Security. All went well, though I had to update some of the programs. The system was stable and Dream Scene and Stardock work fine, and I have power enough to run them with no problems. I have a Davis weather station and their driver and software works fine, though it was written before Vista. I had a problem with Trend Micro when I installed Service Pack. I still haven't solved that problem. I am using the security provided by vista as well as Avira Anti Virus with no problems. the system appears to be stable and fast. I would recommend Vista if you do your homework. I haven't looked back since I switched to Vista.

Jim Cook 

I have had about the same experience. (also i have built my own PC)

Now even though lots of us may approve of vista a larg magority of people will not agree. In fact, most people i know hate vista with an extreme (unknown) passion. Most to do with the media and apple adds not to mention the bloggisfear. Like paul has sayed in many podcasts before that vista's perception with people on average has been terrible. My brother for example has a Toshiba laptop with vista. He is deturmined to uninstall it. why you might ask? because he feels that its a terrible and buggy operating system YET has had no problem's to date. Also most people that i know that have been running vista seem to scring at the sound of it. And all even if it hasent caused them any problems hate it. In additon most problems that people experience i.e. Blue screen's are all blamed on the operating system. Good luck trying to recommend vista to people because from my experience, almost everyone has sayed to me that vista is bad.

 That seems to be about right. Many people respond to hysteria as though it is fact. Witness the global warming and it's supposed relation to CO2. By the way, I was considering trying an Apple as a general purpose computer. It does ok for most things, but heaven forbid the person who has something to do that Steve Jobs didn't think of. I supported the Sinclair QL in the mid and late 1980's and wrote much software and drivers for special requirements. I don't intend to do this to make Apple's machines do what I want. Since the presentation of Apple's anti Vista commercials, which as you and I know are outright lies, I lost all interest in Apple. If I need to change (unlikely) I'll probably go with Ubuntu Linux.

Jim