'Sysadmins' in enterprise environments don't set policy, they just work with what they've been given (as do developers, which is what I do). That said, yours must be some of the best in the business if they ever wrung anything close to 'acceptable' performance out of a 1-gig Vista configuration. We started out at two gigs, wound up having to upgrade almost immediately.

'Untested crap' is, unfortunately, an all too accurate description of the Vista deployment package I have been laboring with for the last three months. You're absolutely right that big-volume customers were the loudest critics of Vista's late delivery. They are also the ones who are going to pay the most for Microsoft having delivered a product that was both late and profoundly flawed.

I think that the rushed deployment of Win7 will probably will likely fix the problem in the consumer market...end users aren't going to do something as scary as switch OS's at much less than gunpoint. But I still think that the old saying that "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" may've just gotten a bit less axiomatic.

The Fortune Ten company that pays my bills has commenced a two year. multi-million dollar roll-out of a profoundly defective product. The development team I work with volunteered to be 'early adopters' within this process. I am here to report that my Vista-equipped 4GB Lenovo laptop craters occasionally and otherwise runs at speeds I recall from Windows 3.1. My group will likely get bumped up to Win7, while secretaries and such remain stuck w/Vista. My point is this: M$ is making a necessary decision on behalf of their consumer customer base that is going to have long-term and expensive consequences for their most ardent supporters within their corporate/enterprise customer base. No CIO who hasn't already signed off on a Vista rollout already is likely to do so now. Instead, they are going to retain XP for as long as possible...and just maybe start wondering if SLED isn't such a bad idea after all. I absolutely believe that Win7 is being rolled out as quickly as possible. Vista is perhaps the biggest mistake M$ has ever made, and the bleeding has to be staunched. But I remain highly skeptical that an aggressive Win7 is going to accomplish that much, long-term. The strategy that Microsoft used to dominate the software industry is unravelling even faster than their flagship product. Vista is hardly the end of Microsoft as a company.....but I think it may very well mean the end of an era.