Regarding the original post, although we use the metric system here, I love that American expression: "your mileage may vary." A lot of what Apple fans (or should I say "devouts"?) brag about the Macintosh derives from the fact that MacOS is run on a single, rigid hardware platform about which Apple has absolute control and which has very little variation. By contrast, all versions of Windows run on a practically infinite number of component combinations, and Microsoft has to make a "one-size-fits-all" solution. Obviously, in some cases the size won't fit. The same applies to Linux: there are many horror stories about all distros, too, as well as many success cases.
So, any Windows version can possibly have problems with a particular hardware combination, and a sample of just one computer or configuration is not enough to give a general verdict about any Windows release. The opposite may also happen: in spite of all the problems with Vista, we all also know people who had an excellent experience with it and are very happy with it. This probably applies even to the most loathed OS ever, Windows Me (though I don't know personally any such case).
Until four years ago, I was a Windows 2000 Professional user. Win2k ran incredibly well on a very old 233-MHz Pentium II with only 128 MB RAM (64 MB at first). Then in late 2005 I bought (or rather assembled) my current PC - see full specs on the link below, but it's an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ with 2 GB RAM (1 GB at first) - and I started using Windows XP Professional. I had a great experience with it, but then I already got it after SP2, when it became almost a whole new system. I remember I worked at an office at the time (now I work from home), and we all worked with Windows 2000 there, among other reasons because before SP2, XP had the same reputation of being a nightmare OS as Vista today, and companies didn't trust it.
Later I tried Vista, and it wasn't a good experience, although it wasn't exactly a horror story either. I didn't have any hardware or driver problems, and it worked very well at first, but later on I did have a lot of software problems: not only were many programs incompatible, but I found out that it was very easy to do something apparently harmless that would render Vista completely unstable and unusable, with weird bugs no one knew how to fix. After several reinstalls and the same instability appearing seemingly out of nothing, I gave up. Yet there were still lots of things I liked in Vista, starting with the interface: when one spends 80-90% of one's waking time in front of a computer, having a nice interface, even a beautiful one, makes a lot of difference for one's motivation and productivity.
So, frustrated and reluctantly, I went back to XP, but Xzaviar's original post that originated this thread reminded me a lot of what I felt when I gave up Vista. The situation was remarkably similar, and so were the problems I had. But I took Windows 7 very seriously and started using it in dual-boot with XP since the RC. I knew I couldn't keep using XP forever, just as one couldn't use Windows 95 forever. I don't work directly in IT any more, but I am a technical translator also working with software localization, so I have to keep myself almost as current as an actual IT professional.
Contrary to Vista, my experience with Windows 7 has been so good that now I've felt confident enough to retire XP. There are a few legacy specialist applications I have to use that won't run on Win7, just as they wouldn't on Vista, but for them I have a XP virtual machine on VMware Player. It works very well, but I find myself using it very little, and the incompatible apps are too few to be worth having a separate boot partition for XP; they will eventually be replaced and go into oblivion as well. Do I miss XP? Definitely not - in fact, I feel as if I've been thrown into the Flintstones' age when I still have to use it. Do I look back or consider giving up Windows 7? Heavens no!!! And yes, Windows 7 still has a few rough edges, but they are incredibly few and manageable for a system that was commercially released just over a month ago. It is better than most Windows versions so far were after their SP1!
Again, a sample of one computer is not significant, regardless of whether the experience is good or bad. But if you take the average of comments, stories and experiences, you will see that my experience is rather typical, with XP, with Vista and with Windows 7. This time it's for real, and you'd better get used to it, because Windows 7 is here to stay, and I have no doubt about it.
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oes anyone know what OS the server of this website is using?
