But, it CAN offer mysterious configuration changes, daily explorer crashes and frustration at the illogical design! Don't forget that.

All of the marketing 'buzz' around this - oops, I mean journalistic excitement - certainly has a manufactured feel, which is right in line with every MS product for the past 8 years at least.

I approached Vista similarly to how I approached Windows 98 - having not used MS's products for several years, I thought I'd give it a chance and give them the benefit of a doubt for having worked out past deficiencies. I bought a laptop and didn't go out of my way to avoid Vista.

Vista has performed about as well as Windows 98. Explorer (the task bar portion) crashes 2-3 times a week. The system has been been 'losing' my audio driver lately, and gives conflicted information about this. The configuration options are still a strange mix of sophisticated and primitive, and very vague and indefinite compared to Linux. I would be a fool to think that Windows 7 is going to be any different. I'm quite confident that this will be, like Vista, a window washing on an old OS, and that I'll be sticking with Linux, which keeps getting better and better.