I dont think Microsoft knows what it is doing. It sure looks like they jumped the gun announcing the next operating system. Historically MS has never gotten an OS out the door on time and there is no reason to believe its true for the next one either. MS jumped the gun releasing Vista when they should have gotten things in order first. Nvidia nearly did the OS in by offering drivers that blue screened at every oppurtunity and now users have gotten into a negative mindset that will never be overcome.
Nvidia drivers were pretty bad, overall. However, DirectX 10 itself isn't exactly stelar. You code something that has to interface with DX10, and no matter how well YOUR code is, DX10 could still mess up the end result.
Meanwhile Vista users (mostly gamers) are really enjoying the OS and taking benefit of the 64 bit environment that Ultimate offers. The more things change the more people want them to remain the same. I know people that are running XP on the same system they ran 98 on and now with Vista they want the OS to conform to their hardware and when it doesnt they complain the OS is terrible. With Vista you absolutely MUST throw more power at it with hardware and that is not likely to change in the next OS MS releases.
The 64-bit comment might not be accurate. 64-bit is still buggy and highly unsupported, compared to 32-bit, which itself isn't a dream to compare things to.
As for hardware requirements: Going from Win98 to XP was a little bit of a step up. Nothing major. However you can NOT run Vista properly without a dual core and 2 GB ram. Vista needs a frickin' GIGABYTE of ram and its own CPU core just to run the OS and nothing else. That's one of the stupidest arbitrary code bloat increases ever! There's "progress" then there's "MS getting plain sloppy" and this falls well into the latter category.
For me Microsoft finally offered what I have been looking for and since SP1 I havent had a single OS glitch that I didnt cause myself. I have had older software programs crash. The same programs would crash XP Pro and that would result in a system crash and forced reboot. With Vista after SP1 the OS announces the program has crashed and must be closed and then searches for a solution (there never is a solution because the program was poorly written by somone outside of MS). The OS does not crash although I do usually reboot to avoid issues I might not be aware of. The thing that is missing there is the potential for a crashed file system jumbled page file and an OS that wont boot and must be reinstalled as I often saw in XP Pro. I took steps to avoid problems then and I still do just in case. I will let you know if I ever have a major system meltdown or some catastrophe strikes but it really has been smooth sailing so far.
You must have had a seriously screwed up version of XP Pro. I've beat my system up with my own stupidity and COUNTLESS programs, games, tools, utilities, settings, and have almost NEVER had XP Pro crash on me ever, since I first got it. It's a major leap above Win98SE (high praise from me!) and far more stable. I haven't had a BSOD in probably almost a decade now. I have NOT had a forced reboot since Win98SE and even then I only had 2-3 in the entire span of years I used that OS as well.
As for "recovery, tries to solve it," that's a standard feature of Windows XP.
You seem quite biased when you type the above and include comments such as:
"(there never is a solution because the program was poorly written by somone outside of MS)"
You blame other programs that function normally in XP for crashing in Vista. You blame the instability on the other programs and imply nobody outside of MS can program properly. Let us not forget that MS has so much code bloat that they HID an entire little 3D flight sim inside MS Word at one update and nobody at MS caught it until well after the fact.
End of the line: On the same hardware that runs Vista with no problem, XP runs noticably better. That means it's NOT just a matter of having the hardware to run it, even WHEN you do it's worse that what we've already had for almost a decade now. Given that, and the fact that XP will still run most games just as well as Vista, but can do so on 1/8th the system requirements, it means Vista was a bad idea.
To quote [paraphrase] Bill Gates, "Yeah, Vista was a bad idea."
Edit: Sorry if I came off as a crab, was in a bit of a mood. Edited.
