OSNews

i was gonna say the same thing, windows vista only driver problem was with crappy video drivers from nvidia and the drivers from creative., who apart from the fact the beta of vista was in the public domain for such a long time still couldn't get their drivers togeather.

Creative are well known for being the slowest when it comes to drivers for their products. Most of the drivers than were on the CD's for windows XP felt more like beta releases then finals.

I would say that the only problems vista suffered at the begining was that some of the newer tech introduced was a little rough (i.e. new file copying routines, network copying and some memory management).

I use Mac OSX at home and Vista at work. At the beginning i wasn't to impressed with vista, however the various updates and SP1 as polished it off. It's now quicker and more hard wearing, which i know is a weird term which ill explain. I use virtual machines, sometimes maxining out the memory in Windows XP and then releasing it, windows xp would still thrash the hdd after as if it was still maxed out of memory. Vista however seems to handle this process a lot better.

There are other things as well such as the impressive network speed when used with Windows 2008 server.

The only problem which still remains and will always be their is resource requirement. It has sacrificed being lean for adding features which is not a bad thing on today's desktop.

However on netbooks and lower spec'd PC's this is a major problem. Hindsight is a great thing, however this is not a critisim as such as netbooks suddenly came out of nowhere in popularity (i know that netbooks or ultramobiles had been around for longer, but these were very niche such as the sony TX Series and only used by a few due to high price). Microsoft could have repackaged XP as Windows "light" to run on lower grade hardware.

It seems that Microsoft are leaving open a market in which they are only plugging it with an older product, which is good on one side as XP works, is familiar and very matured/stable. However from a marketing/blog worthy side it's also pretty damaging as they still have this 7 year old OS out there confusing consumers.

The only other thing i would say in defense of Windows XP and why it's still about, is that Vista, apart from some small things (most of which are covered by third parties) it offers very little reason to upgrade from Windows XP on the business desktop. For example for my network i would have to purchase a whole set of desktop's just to get everyone to where they are now. Windows XP works well, it's stable and it gets the work done. If there was some amazing incentive then i could understand it, but there's little to entice.