[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Xanthe

Yup, that's the game changer. It does some things much better than XP, but there are such quirks and hoops-to-be-jumped-through in comparison that you can only ask yourself what the programmers were high on when they were coding it.

I don't assume they were high. I assume Vista got pushed out the door before it was ready. MS was trying to end-of-life XP, and generate a new revenue stream.

There were some grimly amusing emails leaked from Microsoft, because a lot of systems in the pipeline simply weren't powerful enough to run Vista with acceptable performance. Various OEMs complained that their systems couldn't meet the specs for Microsoft Vista Certified, and wouldn't be able to till their next generation of systems got released. So MS created a new branding level called "Vista Capable" that the systems could meet. MS SVP Jim Allchin, in charge of Windows development, was furious. He felt (correctly) that the customer would not have a good experience and MS would get yet another black eye in the market. CEO Ken Ballmer said "I had nothing to do with that decision!"

Half of the problems I heard with Vista were by products of what MS should have been doing since NT: making the default user profile Power User, instead of assuming the logged on user was Administrator with all powers. Most exploits need Administrator access, and bounce if the user isn't Administrator.

The other half were from folks running Vista on machines that just weren't up to it. When that machine is a new purchase fresh from the vendor, with Vista pre-installed...

The only thing in Vista/Win7 I could really use is support for true symbolic links in the file system.
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Dennis