Love or hate does it matter, at least while MS has only Apple and the split Linux group as competitors. Unless of course MS grossly over prices this - as they may well do.

Otherwise MS will get a good market share sooner or later - through new PC's, any upgraders who think a new Vista Windows must be better than the old XP Windows and users forced to upgrade to get any new Vista features. Expect less support/upgrades for XP too.

IMHO Microsoft is pulling wool over everyone's eyes. They're boasting of this new 'experience' as they always do... and most users turn off their processor-hungry extras only to see the skeleton behind the interface which (up to this point, at least) is nothing more than an interface very similar to Windows 95. Why would Microsoft do this? They're selling essentially the same product, to the same people, every couple years... while they add these neat little piracy checks which are simply causing more aggrivation for legitimate users. The bottom line is full of dollar signs.

I've been using the vista beta at home for a month or so now. My girl friend who knows nothing about ram, gigabytes, graphics cards etc. thinks it is much better.

She likes the mail client, the way it organises folders (read her photograph collection), she likes the tags, she likes IE7 (oh tabs are so great!), she likes the media center.

I know all these features have been around on other operating system and in other programs for sometime, however she (like many other home users) has never seen any of them before. I remember being told to remove firefox because it didn't work with some websites (a missing cookie).

The computer is old and frankly slow, but vista does run faster than XP did.

I found it the easiest version of windows to install and VERY fortunatly it saved all the old windows settings and user documents.

I had a problem installing a print driver, but found a way around that quite quickly. Some applications do not seem to want to install, but Open Office did (which saves me shelling out for Office).

I don't really see the 5 reasons to hate as particularly relevant to most users and eve less so in six months time when drivers and software has caught up.

Windows Vista is actually quite good. My girlfriend says so.

The computer is old and frankly slow, but vista does run faster than XP did.

This point was tossed back and forth during the beta - with all due respect I find it very hard to believe.

Did you do an upgrade or a clean install of Vista? Defragging or reinstalling the XP installation could well have speeded it up just as much.

During the beta I have seen no evidence to convince me that Vista typically runs faster than XP on mediocre hardware, but I've seen plenty of evidence that Vista can run significantly slower than XP on the same hardware :-(