Vista killed your scanner? and XP is what ME should have been? WTF are you talking about, how did an OS kill a scanner? And ME was 98 all dressed up, XP and ME are in no way related other than both being MS products, did you forget about 2000? I run Vista64 at work, Vista on my PC and laptop at home and it's the best OS I have ever used. I work as a systems administrator in a department with 20 other admins 6 of us run Vista64 and no one considered changing back to XP. I see a lot of post of people railing on Vista, but I wonder how many of those people spent the time to learn the differences. If I gave up on something just because it was frustrating learning something new, I would hate Linux and would still be using DOS.

Windows 98 was what Windows 95 should have been.
Windows XP was what Windows ME should have been.
Windows 7 is going to be "what Vista should have been."

However in this case, Windows 7 is barely different than Vista. The only reasons I hated Vista was:

1. Like previous MS operating systems, they relied too heavily on Moore's Law. Only this time it bit them. Requirements for reasonable use were way too high, and hardware didn't catch up until just recently. On the contrary, people were used to their 5 year old XP running nice and quickly.

2. Vendors were still failing with drivers left and right, and then there was the whole 64 bit thing that people had been refusing to embrace.

3. The interface change was "different".

What's actually different in Windows 7? Nada. It was supposed to run faster than Vista, but the closer it gets to release time, the more I hear of "The speed is about the same, but at least our hardware has matured now."

Vendors who didn't build drivers for Vista are finally saying "Gee, we're two operating systems behind so maybe we should support Windows 7." Vendors who previously built drivers for Vista did little to no tweaking to get things working for 7. So now your support is covered.

Virtually nothing has changed other than our hardware finally caught up, and people are adjusting to the "Vista"-esque UI. So once people get used to Windows 7, err, "Vista SP3", the dumb ones will say "Why was Vista so bad?" The semi-smart ones will say "Why did we waste our money on an operating system that's not new?", and the geniuses will be cleaning up on the 2nd-hand market building home Linux servers.

I have a 'Diploma" in Computer Technology from a two year technology school (whatever that's worth) and about 3 years in the field experience, recently I landed a job as a Network Admin in the home office for a large corporation. So it is possible, previously I worked for a small to medium business as a Network Admin (which means doing everything). And before that right out of tech school I worked for a small shop starting off working the bench and moved up to on-site an servers. There are some places that won't hire me because I lack a 4 yr degree but most are interested in experience, so be willing to do what it takes to get some.