My latest machine I ordered, a nice loaded Gateway with dual 24" flat panels (in dual portrait mode) came with VISTA. They offered me an XP option and I wished I had taken it, as I did with the machine I bought the year before (another Gateway with dual 21" panels).

Vista claims that older versions of expensive programs, such as Quickbooks, have to be upgraded in order to run. This is not entirely true, as you can run them in "WIN 95" mode, with some tweaking. It took me a week before I had the system up and running. But the help screens don't work anymore (!!). "VISTA does not support this version of help, you must upgrade your software!". Ditto for WORD and the whole Office package. It runs, but no help screen. I have to go back to one of my XP machines to run help sometimes. Awkward.

I think they want to sell new software, and other software providers are probably happy there are incompatibilities.

The problem is, switching to a new system (LINUX, MAC) is not as easy as folks make it out to be, once you have entrenched systems operating for years.

About the only thing VISTA seems to do better than XP is recognize the dual portrait panel arrangement better. XP does odd things on bootup sometimes, and I have to go into "display" and tweak the settings to get it to recognize the panels properly (and display upside up).

VISTA changed the namess of some of the Control Panel programs, which makes things confusing when switching back and forth. Sort of like when Word Perfect (remember them?) changed the F7 key....

I have an older Dell on my network that I use as a music server. I am thinking of loading LINUX on it as an experiment. Bill should hope the experiment doesn't work...

P.S. - it never pays to be an early adopter. I rushed to Windows 3.1 from DOS when it came out. After updgrading my old 386, it would still not run - and there were few applications at the time that were compatible with it. It was little more than a fancy "shell" program. I sent it back and got a refund from Microsoft. Learned a valuable lesson back in 1989...

I'm shedding lots of tears over XP...not!
Having spent thousands of dollars over the years because of Micro$oft continuously changing their software, I decided not-to anymore!

I downloaded Fedora 8, (linux). It does everything, easy to install, comes with tons of applications, even a built-in office suite. Even works with the files from the XP system, so I didn't have to lose anything other than the big bill from Gate$ware. For those applications that I couldn't do without, installing wine seems to make them run just as if it was window$. Linux even brought new life to a couple of older machines I had that were slow running XP and coughed with Vista.