Friends don’t let friends run windows Vista. In that spirit, I offer up a link to this
exhaustively researched piece on the evils that Windows Vista does. I’m not kidding when I say you really should not run this OS – it runs counter to the whole conception of what a computer is . Rather than a machine you purchase which you control, Vista is a platform which a vendor controls, and that vendor is able to choose how the platform behaves. Imagine sticking a HD DVD in to play and discovering you can’t listen to the audio over your headphones, or discovering that your video drivers will no longer deliver video at a resolution greater than 640×480 because Microsoft has helpfully ‘patched’ them to protect against content theft – this and innumerable other horrendous ‘features’ are documented in the piece I linked to above. Anyone in a computing profession should read and consider this. It’s a lengthy but illuminating read.

It’s left with me with something of a dilemma. Gaming is my favorite pastime and thanks to the MS monopoly it’s the only real platform I can use, but there’s no way given the above that I will run Vista. I have about 2 years before this becomes a significant issue (it will take roughly that long before developers start releasing ‘vista only’ games) so I can be patient about it. I’m hoping that enough people are as pissed about this as I am that alternatives emerge. If not, maybe I’ll be a console-only gamer, or maybe a retro-only gamer, playing all the oldies to entertain myself. Who knows. All I know for certain is I’m checking out of windows-land over the coming couple of years due to this stuff.