I use Vista and haven't had any problems with it whatsoever. I use the entire Adobe cs3 suite every day, and I don't notice my laptop slowing down one bit. I have no reason to hate it.
Hating Microsoft has become very fashionable lately. I have a client who is deathly afraid of upgrading to Vista, solely because of what a creative agency told him. This creative agency is full of mac users. Why would they ever say anything positive about windows?
It's really sad that our decisions to use products are made for us by clever marketing strategies.
