Tch!, Tch!
I rarely run Intel (I'm naturally penurious), AMD is nearly always is reliable for me (except when I let the magic smoke out during an overclocking run).
I was given a flaky AMD machine once; it had bad capacitors (not AMD's fault, processor still worked).
I was (by design) a late adopter of Vista and had little problem finding drivers.
...some are just lucky I guess...
Enjoy!
My main problem with that machine was the motherboard - an MSI board with a fatal flaw in that any large packets of data sent over IDE shorted something out... everything single time I tried to burn a CD, my computer shut off. MSI were not helpful, and I don't buy MSI products any more.
I ended up with three sets of bad RAM over the years I had it, but Corsair customer services were always good so I still buy Corsair.
The power supply had an amusing habit of not letting me use the computer... I'd turn it on at the plug, then have to turn it off again to let the capacitors power down. Once that had finished, I could turn it on at the plug once more and use the PC. Fine when it only takes five minutes, but when I had to turn it on before I went to school so I could use it in the evenings, well, not at all fun. I bought another Xclio PSU for this PC though... it squeals at me if my processor usage goes above 15%. No more Xclio products for me.
The processor was an AMD Athlon X2 something or other. 2.2ghz dual core. It ran hot all the time, regardless of what I did with cooling - new heatsink, more fans in the case, no effect. If it was in this machine then I'd probably have no problems, but the constant blue screening (even on XP) that I experienced has soured my thoughts towards AMD.
I was an early adopter of Vista 32-bit, and something of a late adopter for 64-bit; finding drivers for 32-bit was a doddle, I just used the XP ones.
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Talking about XP and Vista, me mam has a Creative Zen MP3 player - our XP PC is SP3, and it worked fine on her Vista laptop.
Some people do just get lucky.