Sick of Microsoft bashing
We have an MSDN subscription, so in the first week of December last year, a shiny pack of Vista disks plopped onto my desk. I took a quick backup of my system drive, bunged in the disk, formatted and installed. Driver support was nonexistent, however, I was able to happily use the old XP drivers, freely downloadable from my motherboard manufacturers site.
Used it quite happily for a month, got a new machine, installed Vista. This time, it fired up for the first time, and told me that a bunch of 'updates' (5 or so) were available from windows update. These were security patches and so forth. Installed the drivers for my motherboard directly from the manufacturers website, no problem.
Come May, new hardware, new machine, new reinstall. This time, upon getting to the desktop for the first time, Vista had gone off to windows update and got 20 new drivers, for ALL my hardware (including specific ones for my mouse + keyboard, printer, scanner, every tiny bit of my motherboard, wireless, phone). All installed flawlessly, no problem.
So Microsoft ARE doing their bit - windows update under vista is a total joy. Even a brain-dead 'home' user is capable of clicking 'yeah, I'd like to install all these latest drivers please'. I wonder how many people complaining about a lack of driver support are people sticking in the CD that came in the box of the hardware and battling with some god-awful, custom autorun application, rather than going to the manufacturers website and getting a proper, clean .inf driver install pack - which is what any half-clued up person, or IT bod in a business would do anyways.
Vista runs like a dream on both my home and work PCs - admittedly, they're fairly high spec (scoring 4.2 and 5.2 on the windows experience thing respectively), and I've not found ANY program that won't run on it - but maybe that's because I stick to decent applications and keep my kit free of desktop toolbars, search helpers, background virus scanners, anti-spyware programs, yahoo messenger clients, 3 or 4 different firewall products, adaware, popup blockers and all the other crap that I constantly find on the computers of people and businesses that we don’t support.
But the renaming of Add / Remove Programs makes me gnash my teeth and have a hissy fit every time I go looking for it.