Things that people from Microsoft say about both open source and google are often very stupid, and this bit from Mr. Ozzie is no exception.

I have an aversion to video, so unfortunately I cannot comment on the rest.

Or, you might be trying to run the configuration program that Toshiba supplied with your laptop

well, consider yourself lucky.

I've gotten about 5 in vista. Probably hardware, sure, I guess... Also, explorer (taskbar) crashes like 3 times a day, only in 4 day clusters every other week.

Nothing like that happens in Linux on the same laptop.

First 'Mojave', now 'Windows 7'.

Same thing - Vista with a new theme.

This whole 'Windows 7' thing has the feel of an MS marketing blitz. Of course they 'leaked' the OS to the public themselves.

If you've let your kid sign up for anything other than unlimited texting, you've not made a wise decision.

Why the hell do you have 11 copies of Vista?

YOU FORGOT ACTIVE DESKTOP

The Linux kernel was overhauled majorly towards the release of 2.0, and then massively for 2.2. Major portions were rewritten for 2.4, which had some big advantages. It bears no resemblance to Minix under the hood - that's a joke.

But that's not fair for a comparison to 'Windows', which is much more than a kernel. Have the codebases to KDE or GNOME have been overhauled? Yes, each has been undergoing massive development in the past 10 years, and they are more stable and sophisticated than ever.

In the Windows world, MS was so sure that even XP was not much of an advance over Win 2000, that they didn't even give it a new version number... let's count. NT 4... NT 5 (win2K), XP (?), Vista (Windows 6), windows 7. Where did the extra number go? Ah yes, XP is basically Windows 2000. They spent that 18 months fixing bugs and dreaming up a new name.

Is there some new rule that 20% of the posts on a story have to be about Slashdot moderation?

I think the problem is that Vista is overall so slow and fragile, that it's hard to care if it has 'network and I/O priority' or not.

I gave Vista a fair chance, honestly. It is adequate, but pretty lousy given the resources MS had to make it not suck... and it sucks. They've gone nowhere in the past 8 years.

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.