Really?

[commodorejohn]

Hey, I use Windows damn near every day! My Windows Vista machine sits right next to my Amiga. I'm not saying Windows is the best OS there is (by any stretch!), but it isn't all that bad. There is loads of excellent software written for Windows, including loads of excellent games!
When it comes to "phones" I don't see anything all that great about most of what's available, no matter who makes it.

Okay, I'm actually not ill-disposed towards Windows, but...Vista? 7 or XP I could see (I'm an XP diehard, myself,) but Vista? ME's at least kind of adorable in its awfulness...

In any case, while I may like some of their products (XP and...well, pretty much just XP,) I have not been impressed by Microsoft's behavior in recent years. It seems like they've lost any semblance of restraint that they once had, don't understand that people use an operating system to run programs, not to be the Program (and here Tron thought it was being satirical with the MCP absorbing all functions, those many years ago,) and seem to have decided that they can imitate Apple's unabashedly marketing-driven success by hiring marketers whose brainstorming sessions consist of huffing paint thinner and seeing how badly they can make ad-characters' behavior fall into the Uncanny Valley (remember those frighteningly robotic sitcom people from the Windows 7 ad?) Can't say I'm surprised to find out that the company is as moribund internally as it appears to be from the outside...

[commodorejohn]

Ther resource creep (ok..flood) is ridiculous though. Vista needs 2GB and DX9 card to get up in the morning, hammers the HDD constantly and still won't multitask as well as the old creaky A1200.

This. That's a large part of the reason I'm planning on switching to Linux when I can no longer get an XP machine - I'm sick of getting newer, nicer hardware only to have the new Windows version take up so much more of the system resources that it only runs marginally better than my previous system :/

[commodorejohn]

To be fair, a lot of that has to do with the fact that modern machines are faster than most things they are used for.  When the machine already runs your software at full speed, there isn't much else to get out of it.  For example, I have a first gen Atom with Ion video that I use for XBMC.  In another room I have an i5 for the same purpose.  They both run XBMC at full speed, so even though the i5 is WAY faster, I only get a small improvement in usability.

Yes and no. It's true that CPU speed is kind of approaching a saturation point (at least for everyday tasks, not so much for heavy-duty stuff like audio/video editing,) and while the pointless glitz that gets shoehorned into commercial OSes bogs things down, it's easy enough to turn off (one of my first steps with any new install.) But that's not the only factor for performance, or even the most important. You know what is? Memory. If you have 2+GB of RAM on an XP machine, you can turn off virtual memory and enjoy sweet, sweet freedom from disk-banging when you have more running at once than a web browser and Notepad. Vista? 2GB is the basic minimum for reasonable operation. Hard drives keep getting roomier, but Vista jumped from XP's requirement of 1-2GB for a typical install to a minimum of 15GB free disk space. It's not so vast a difference now that 1TB drives are fairly easy to come by, but it's still appalling.