Maybe if I stop hearing quite so much negativity towards vista, I might look at getting it, but for now, XP works perfectly fine for me.
And I'm sure Windows 98 worked perfectly well when XP came onto the scene. If you recall, XP had a lot of negativity thrown onto it from people who refused to change. Now just about everyone running Windows uses XP.
It'll be the same thing for Vista. In a year or two people will forget what they were whining about in the first place.
Also, for Trusted Computing to work, your system needs a TPM. Non-OEM boards generally don't have one of those. It is a non-issue unless you buy a Dell or similarly branded computer and (in the case of Dell, anyway; haven't worked with other OEM systems with a TPM) go out of your way to enable it. A lot of people whine about the DRM imposed with HD DVD and Blu-Ray, but that's all the work of the movie studios. I somewhat doubt Microsoft really wants to burn those kinds of bridges and I can't find it in my heart to blame them.
I still stand by my belief that most of the people that bitch about Vista did nothing more than look at the system requirements and dismiss it on the spot, despite the fact that competing operating systems have the same requirements.
People talk about how much more efficient OS X is. Well, no. It doesn't use system memory as effectively and it requires as much as Vista does.
People go on about how tiny Linux can be. Well, yeah. It's a shame that once you add modules for every type of modern hardware imaginable, Xorg, GNOME/KDE/Xfce/whatever, hundreds upon hundreds of support libraries to support any kind of application imaginable (since there are dozens of different ways of doing the same damn thing) you wind up with an OS that takes far more disk space than it needs and can quickly consume memory above and beyond the needs of the standard operating environment. The only way you're going to get a Linux desktop that's appreciably faster and more efficient than Mac OS and Windows is by rolling your own or choosing a source-based distro, and even then things can balloon out of control. Say I'm a KDE user who wants to use the Gimp. All of a sudden I have to have a full GTK+ setup, not to mention whatever dependencies it uses, all of which consume additional memory when I decide to load it. With Windows and OS X, most programs utilize the system default libraries, meaning that the only thing taking up space is the program itself and whatever resources it needs to do its job. Much more efficient.
It bugs me when people whine about how much memory Vista "consumes." Right now, Vista is using 3GB of my memory. If you think it absolutely
requires all of that memory, please let me know so I can unceremoniously ban you. My mom's laptop, which has 2GB of RAM, has about 1-1.5GB used. The system with 512MB of RAM that I accidentally installed Vista on only had about 400MB in use at any given time. This is the reason why I can do just about anything in the OS without having to wait for it. Let's say I want to start up a game that requires a lot of RAM. Since it's just cache data, Vista can drop it immediately and give my game however much RAM it wants. Additionally, it disables Aero to prevent it from interfering with or lagging the game (which is another major point that some people seem to refuse to acknowledge or flat-out lie about).
The system requirements are another thing. I've had numerous people whine about how "they heard" that Vista stalls on lower-end systems. Well, guess what, I used it on a lower-end system and it ran about as well as XP. I've had people call me a liar because I said that Vista ran well with 512MB of RAM. Never mind the fact that I've
used a machine with Vista Business that had 512MB of RAM quite a bit (it was a test machine at my old workplace and I intentionally pushed it hard).
People just assume too many things without asking themselves WHY it is the way it is. People see that Vista is taking 3GB+ of their 4GB of available RAM. Rather than clicking around and saying, "oh hey, it's still quick and responsive!" they start screaming "LOL FUCKING MEMORY HOG." The official name for this feature is "SuperFetch."
Woo, that turned into a long-winded rant. Holy crap, I'm turning into Bobbias. -_-
(jk u no i luv u <3) I'll just stop here for everyone's sake (including my own).