I thought all the belly-aching about Vista was just people hating changes. Until I actually had to deal with a Vista PC. When my girlfriend bought a new HDTV, I built an HTPC to go with it, running Vista. Every driver just stops working (in interesting and confusing ways) every now and then, and has to be reinstalled. Yesterday I spent an hour poking at the network driver because it wouldn't connect and I couldn't watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica (and not being able to watch Battlestar Galactica makes me angry). Every once in a while the HDMI audio driver just stops working and has to be reinstalled. When switching between inputs on the TV, sometimes the video signal goes black, and the machine has to be hard rebooted. I'm sure these are all the fault of the hardware people writing crappy drivers, but it sure is a pain in the ass.

Amazon's Unbox software does something even worse on Vista. For some reason I can't figure out, it will only run once--on the next boot, it fails to start. That would be fine, except it tries to start again, and Vista pops up one of its "application has encountered an error and will be closed" or whatever...and Unbox tries to start again. Infinite loop. Since the Vista popup steals focus and cannot be ignored, the system has to be rebooted, and the app has to be uninstalled before the infinite loop kicks in.

I'd been led to believe that constant rebooting was a thing of the past in Vista...I think I reboot this box more than the XP install on my gaming system.

Vista is the worst computing experience I believe I've ever had. (And I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 96, when there were like five well-supported pieces of hardware, and I've also used every Windows since 95 in my life as an IT support contractor. I think many would say that Windows ME was the worst, but now I'd have to disagree. At least all of the drivers from 95/98 worked on ME.)