*cough* buy a Mac *cough*
Well, I guess you guys got lucky. My Vista experience was bad. Bad, bad, bad. I hated that damn thing. My computer was slow as hell, programs would crash far too often, it just had way too many bugs. And let's face it, MS knew it sucked. That's why they worked overtime to release Win7 so soon after Vista.
By the way, I think your experience was better because of the version you had. Lenny, were you using 64-bit, as well? I was running plain old vanilla Home Premium, but I'd heard from friends who were running the 64-bit Vista that it was a lot more stable. Though I'm not sure why that would be the case...
Are you sure you could do that in Vista? I might be wrong, but I seem to remember that one of the gripes about UAC was that you couldn't turn it off, which they fixed in Win7.
Let me first say I do not dislike Microsoft - people forget so quickly what things were like before they came up with what is effectively an industry standard OS. It may not be the best but the fact that nearly everyone uses it means an awful lot.
For those that don't/can't remember back that far: before the PC and DOS came along every computer was different (typically even between different computers from the same manufacturer). Consequently if you wrote an application it would only run on the one target computer system. Consequently something like a Word Processor (if you could really call them that back then) cost in the order of £20k - I kid you not. Anyone want to go back to that. Not to mention that changing computers required a one week course on the new system.
When the PC came out you could write a single application that had a potential marketplace big enough to offer the software at sensible prices. With the advent of Windows everyone got used to a particular style of interface, to the extent that when you got a new piece of software you just started using it; no need to spend a week reading the operators manual. Admittedly with some of MS's new interfaces it now seems we are going back to square one again, which I hate. So it may not be the best but MS gave us a standard that made all computer work easier from that time on.
Now my grouch. I have just gone to Windows 7 and I hate it with a vengence. It may be more stable than Vista (I managed to skip Vista altogether) but it is far, far, far less stable that XP. With my old XP machine I almost never had lock ups requiring the power switch to kill it (maybe once or twice in a year) I have had at least a dozen in the two and half months I have W7. Half the time when I launch a new program it does not load on top of other applications but behind them and I have to bring it forward. I've had to switch to Live Mail whose address search combo goes bonkers when it has drilled down to two options. I'm going to have to replace the Windows jpeg quick viewer thing as I do a lot of work with photos and now each time I open a photo to look at it it comes up in a new instance of the software (and MS say that can't be changed) and within a short while I discover I have about 50 open coies of the Windows Image viewer. The list goes on; mostly small irritants but irritants that weren't present in XP.
In fairness I am a software developer and that does generally give OS's a hard time - testing your own software that contains bugs that mess up the OS. But it is all much worse than when I was on XP. Then again I have moved from a laptop with a single processor and 2G of memory to a laptop with 8 processors with 8G of memory running 64bit W7 and I can barely notice any improvement in general usage speed.