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Hola! Always good to see you; te extraño mucho.

I don’t get the vitriol on this topic. I am probably an outcast here, but I think Vista is absolutely amazing.

When I first used Vista I marveled at the beauty of the interface, and when I realized that the start bar would let me start typing stuff in and it would present me with an intelligently searched list of options to select...for instance: I start typing in C.....A.....

and I get

Calculator
Calendar

in an attractive menu, and I can key in immediately get what I want....that is AWESOME. To Vista’s credit I TOTALLY can’t help it but accidentally expect that when I use XP and even when I use Mac OS X.

XP doesn’t let me do that valuable thing, nor does the Mac.

But, I have also been bit in the ass by Vista. I actually have applications that I paid THOUSANDS of dollars for that SIMPLY DON’T WORK ON VISTA. My Schematic Capture tool and PCB layout tool are extremely expensive pieces of software that I need, and simply won’t work on Vista. And don’t for a second think that I am some kind of specialized weird-o and I have strange tools that do weird things. The ONLY reason my expensive software fails is because they chose to use microsoft databases as their file format (which microsoft wanted), or something like that. Something they thought WOULD LAST FOREVER. That is it. Something stupid like that. Now, the apps simply don’t work.

So, to get them to work on Vista, I had to install them in a virtual machine running XP on top of my Vista OS.

So I did that, because I want to keep my clients for whom I’ve designed circuit boards.

Get ready for the money shot here...

...Ok, so the failure of Vista to let me run my most important apps led me to discover the concept of VMs, so I could run an XP VM on the new Vista that I was forced to run.

Then I decided to get into iPhone development, where you have to have a mac to even get started.

So I had to get a Mac. But since I’d already discovered the magic of running Windows XP apps in a VM it was extremely easy to get the same thing going on the mac. But it turns out that there are better VM solutions for running Windows apps on the MAC than there are for running Windows apps under windows! (I kid you not)

So not only am I running all of my XP stuff on my Mac, I learned through experience that IT WORKS BETTER ON THE MAC THAN IT DOES ON A PC.

So here I am writing this post quite literally on a Mac on its 5th or 6th reboot that I’ve ever done. The same Mac that I run my windows apps on, and now the new mac apps that I am discovering, mostly because Vista simply decided not to let me run my programs.

In case anyone “goes there” I own 4 orders of magnitude more stock in Microsoft than I do Apple.