What did you get for your purchase of Vista? Well, you lost (at least temporarily) support of OpenGL (with no warning - until you got the updated Vista graphics driver with the Vista ICD), you gained a huge hardware requirement (CPU, memory, Video) but Vista uses those hightened hardware requirements LESS effectively than WinXP. As an added bonus, that laser printer, that high speed $$$ SCSI scanner, your raster printer and a host of other products that you paid dearly for, no longer are supported under Vista. Why? Is it because they cannot be supported? Is it because they are worn out? No, it's because unlike WinXP which allows backward compatibility with older drivers, Vista demands new drivers. Is there a warning somewhere that tells us that we will need to replace perfectly functional hardware? Nope.
I worked for decades in the PC industry, I did WHQL testing, I did 64 bit de-bug on the Antlon and Opterons, I worked as a Quality manager for a very large company. I see this as decreasing quality coming from MSFT, while they raise the price for a more inferior product.
Sure, you "shouldn't" upgrade from Win 3.1 to Win 2K, then to WinME, then to WinXP - but millions did. This option was offered by MSFT, these products are made by MSFT, these products are supported by MSFT - so why do you excuse MSFT when people use an offered feature, and their machine is 'buggy'?? "Shame on you for using a feature that is advertized on the box",
MSFT has the financial capability to do a better job, they have very gifted people working in the field, working at Intel and AMD, at Via, LSI, Broadcom, nVidia and a host of other companies - all working (at NO COST to MSFT) to make the next OS better than the last. I have personally responded to MSFT with performance corrections to a driver (PCI protocol, induced latency with a Netgear NIC). I was paid $150K/yr by my employer to do this research, to submit that report and to track it through Netgear and MSFT to get the 'fix' implimented in SP1. That was one among a host of others, I was expected to fix a minimum of 1 bug a week in the hardware/software interface. Some were easy, some were very, very hard.
When a company extorts (and let's face it, we have no real option but to abandon WinXP and move to Win7) the public, and provides less than a smooth transistion - I reserve the right to call them on it.
The date on that review is from nearly 2 1/3 years ago. Many improvements have been made since then - with remarkable improvements made in the area of graphics performance due to nVidia and ATI witting better drivers.
No one lost openGL support as every one who uses openGL for anything remotely productive uses the vendor drivers which support OGL better in the first place.
As for using the hardware less effectively - that isn’t correct. With 4/8GB of RAM techs like superfetch make the system much more responsive as do the kernel and scheduler enhancements for multicore processors.
*Is there a warning somewhere that tells us that we will need to replace perfectly functional hardware?*
That is a flat out and out misstatement of reality - Microsoft publishes a HQL and if the vendors don’t update their drivers take it up with them.