How many of you use Windows Vista? I personally know about 10 people that are running it as their primary operating system and the majority of them are satisfied. The machine that I have running Windows Vista is a Dell OptiPlex GX270 with 3 GHz Intel Pentium 4, 2.5 GB of RAM, and a 128MB NVidia GeForce FX 5200. For those that are experiencing Windows Vista problems, suck it up.

Windows Vista isn’t going away anytime soon because Microsoft spent so long developing this baby of theirs.

And it is because of this reason that I don’t believe Windows Vista will be going done the same road as Windows ME; even though it has arguably the same amount of incompatibility problems.

Windows ME was a catastrophe that everyone is well aware of and it was an extremely rushed operating system. Here are the dates of when each Windows operating system had been released to the mainstream consumer since Windows 98.

• Windows 98 — June 1998
• Windows 98 SE — May 1999 (released 11 months after previous OS)
• Windows 2000 — February 2000 (released 9 months after previous OS; I am aware that this OS was designed for businesses but I am including for effect)
• Windows ME — September 2000 (released 6 months after previous OS; released 16 months after last personal edition)
• Windows XP — October 2001 (released 13 months after previous OS)
• Windows Vista — January 2007 (released 62 months after previous OS)

Windows ME came out at a time when Microsoft was in a hurry to develop operating systems at an alarming rate. I honestly want to know what Microsoft was thinking by releasing 2 operating systems in the same year. I understand that Windows 2000 and Windows ME are completely different operating systems because of the fact that Windows 2000 had NT integrated into it but it still raises the question of why. Windows 2000 was a great operating system that could be used by a regular home user and in the professional world. I had 2 machines that ran it and it was awesome. Then I decided to “upgrade” one of them to Windows ME and things went downhill. I ended up reformatting the machine after 3 months of horror and reinstalling Windows 2000.

Let me also say that has a basic argument, that Windows 2000 and Windows XP were essentially the same operating system. The main different being the Windows XP featured extra eye candy. I understand the concept of the new Start Menu being so program shortcuts wouldn’t take up space on my desktop and I like it. But why completely change the interface to Luna? I never use it on any of my machines.

With how fast Apple, Inc has been putting how new operating systems, or service packs that users have to pay for, Microsoft needed to make its presence felt again. When world came out that Vista was going to be delayed, delayed, and delayed again, people started to get antsy. According to Wikipedia, on August 27, 2004, the source code (based on Windows XP) was completely scraped (used source code from Windows Server 2003).

This meant a couple of things: (1) that Microsoft was going to once again push back the release date of Windows Vista and (2) that several features, included WinFS, were going to be done away with. Windows Vista was developed in 28 months after the original source code was trashed and the majority of this delay was so third-party developers could code drivers and write programs that would be compatible. Third-party developers should be ashamed of themselves for not being able to create programs that would work for Windows Vista. There have been public betas and release candidates available for Windows Vista since September 2005.

Now it is almost August 2007 (two years after betas have been available) and we still don’t have an operating system that runs the way it is supposed to.

I hope that you have enjoyed my rant. Feel free to post any comments or join all of us at http://live.pirillo.com.