Just for the record, it's true. MS is clamping down on hardware independence, with Vista. The current trend is amazing: MS is turning into the old Apple and Apple is turning into the old MS.
Well, I’m just a normal guy looking for a new home computer system, since our old one finally reached it’s end. We’ve always used MS Windows, and I’ve actually had good luck with Dell systems going all the way back to the mid-90’s.
I’m savvy enough to know that you really want to give a new OS a year or so to let them work out all the bugs. But, I needed a new system, so I ordered a Dell Dimension E521, with 2G RAM, 320G hard drive, new Dell monitor and printer. I was very impressed, INITIALLY, with Vista. It seemed pretty cool. However, within days of getting the machine, it seemed that more and more driver incompatibility issues would arise. So, I went through customer no-service quite a bit, which most of the time didn’t fix the problem, and created worse problems. Like intermitently the machine would hang at start-up on the Dell screen, freezing at loading BIOS. Horrible.
In the end, I just boxed everything up and sent the whole system back for a full refund. Lesson learned. My next step will be to go to the local system builder (Milwaukee PC) who is right down the street, and have them build me a similar system. Fortunately, I just found out that they will load XP on the machine if that is my preference.
Does anyone out there read the above and have any other advice for me???? I’d really appreciate it!