The Vista haters are either:
1. Techs who are too lazy to read the HCL and/or SCL that Microsoft has freely available on its site or...
2. People who fed into the hype propagated by those in #1
Fact of the matter is that Vista is the most stable and secure end user version of Windows to date. The only difference is that you have to ensure that the hardware that you're using has proper drivers that were written to meet the higher standards that Microsoft implemented (and that any software you use also rises to the occasion).
Techs over the years have gotten lazy and many just loaded Vista onto their boxes without doing their research. Then when they ran into issues because vendors didn't want to invest more time in programming proper Vista drivers, these "techs" screamed bloody murder that Vista was a "piece of crap".
Microsoft can take some of the blame for the overall perception of Vista as well because they should have revealed exactly what they were really doing when they released it...they designed Vista to be a more secure and equivalently stable competitor to Apple's proprietary masterpiece, MAC OS X.
What happened next was a marketing nightmare though, because the companies like Dell, who pushed $399 boxes that couldn't handle Vista's requirements suddenly started trying to force MS' hand in terms of licensing fees (so that they could upgrade their hardware but keep their overall prices low). MS held strong, but Dell did a power play and told consumers that they could "downgrade" to XP, which was basically an open snub of Vista. From there everyone jumped onto the bandwagon blindly. Some techs that I know who had never touched Vista were declaring it useless.
When I did a TV interview on the various flavors of Vista about a month after they came out and gave the OS a B- overall, some techs thought I was mad. I had to defend myself and thus put out the challenge to any tech who followed the HCL and the SCL to let me know if they had any problems. I had quite a few converts, other than my hardcore Linux buddies.
Anyway...I digress. I'm not a Microsoft evangelist or anything but really...don't hate the player...hate the game.
Now excuse me...I have some compiling to do.
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