I’m not sure I get the windows hate. I’m now running windows 7 and I love it. Even Vista was pretty good. In the 3 years I ran Vista I only had one serious crash and infection and that was just this year.
Compared to XP, that’s miles better reliability. I really couldn’t understand the dislike for Vista, and I started with SP1 and upgraded to SP3. Even SP1 was different than XP, it was much more stable.
I agree. Most people really do love windows 7. Windows Vista though got a bad rap for a couple reasons.
1) Microsoft had a vista ready and vista capable logo program before it released promising the machine could run Vista, but OEMs didn’t make the proper drivers for it so people got ticked when their machines didn’t run Vista properly
2) The security was changed to require administrator privilege to do any admin type activities on the machine. Which is good security but with so many people loving the ease of XP they hated Vista. Win7 gets a thumbs up here because they require a less onerous process, but to get a thumbs up here Microsoft first had to show people how bad it really should be to be truly secure with vista. People like the compromise in Win7.
3) Vista was the first real push to 64 bit computing and many drivers just weren’t made yet (like printer drivers and graphics card drivers). People were mad because the drivers didn’t exist. With Win7 the drivers are pretty much the vista drivers just rebranded with some minor tweaks so they were easy to get out for Win7. Plus people replaced their old printers by now to make them work with vista. In the end Win7’s success really needed the transition Vista provided.