The criminals
First of all, Vista is made by a company named Microsoft and the latter is abusing its monopoly on a regular base. It is better for them to pay multi million fines than loose multi billion profit. But the fines make what Microsoft really is: a criminal organization.
The crap
Second, there are many complaints from people in the field, in particular about missing drivers for their peripherals . I'll admit that Vista looks good. Its eye candy rating is competitive with Apple's OS-X and some Linux distro's. It also tries to make configuration easy, making it an example of what Gnome and KDE - the most popular desktops for GNU/Linux - should look like. Now KDE and Gnome use synaptic - an apt-based software package management system and it looks like Microsoft tried to copy that killer application but they didn't succeed in doing so. It is really unimaginable: Vista is simply not finished, it is a beta. It crashes, behaves strange from time to time, is very slow, leaves you with an unbootable system and can become your worst nightmare. It is crap.
The crooks
Third, the argument where the crooks come in. If you buy a laptop with Vista pre installed you are subject to FUD. For example the last thing you want is Norton anti virus because it is unstable, eats your resources. Clamwin is much better for the people that don't click without thinking first. So if you uninstall Norton you are warned that your 90-day free version will expire, your system will be left in a vulnerable state and that is a disgusting way to get customers. Same story for a MS-Office suite you don't want and - most amusing - Works is installed too (who on earth is using that crap?) and if you remove it it turns out to be not signed by Microsoft. Of course you install OpenOffice.org. Pre installing all kind of crapware is misleading and keeping unaware users from installing great alternatives.
The hang over
Fourth, I wrote this out of frustration. I was configuring a laptop with Vista preinstalled and after I completed everything it left me with an unbootable system and lots of frustration. The lesson learned: get Ubuntu GNU/Linux for example and have a good looking and stable system to work on in a productive way.
The craziness
Finally I'll show you a screen dump of a system recovering after severe fatal crash of Vista. What you see is a restore of the factory hard disk image with the OS in Dutch. I will translate:
Een ogenblik geduld: de bestanden worden geladen...
One moment please: the files are loaded...
... and then ...
G:\Images\DGH0A992.038 wordt nu gek...
G:\Images\DGH0A992.038 is now getting crazy...
This is no yoke, it is a literal translation and the Acer software turns out to be a nice peace of artificial intelligence, they draw the right conclusion!
