Is Vista a "Bad" product?

 In April 2007 I bought a Sony, VGN-N250E, from Best Buy in Lafayette, Louisiana where I was living at the time. Vista Home Premium as the OS. I also bought a wireless router, and a Vista compatable printer. I took all one day setting up the system and getting wireless. Every three days Vista lost all of the drivers to all of the attachments and refused to connect to the internet, Vista telling me to "turn the wireless radio on"!! Needless to say the radio was on. I would spend hours setting it all up again, only to lose it again every three days. Best Buy said it was the IP. (RIGHT) I finally, after six weeks of this, had XP Pro installed. I lost all of the content Sony had installed (the Media Package), the mic/earphone jack no longer works, none of the built in card readers work, but I have been using the computer now for 18+ months with NO trouble connecting to the internet, using my printer, etc. Sony tells me that in order to FIX the things NOT working on the computer will require another install of Vista, as the computer is built to work with Vista only. Vista sucks and has ruined MicroSoft's reputation, period. Bill Gates and associates should be ashamed of themselves for marketing trash!

Vista, is not the issue at hand but more over the factor that when one buys a name brand computer aka Sony, Dell or others (not to plug a full commercial line here) most of the time you need to update the drivers and patches when you first get home right away. These machines have been manufactured on an assembly line, burnt in and boxed up and sat in a warehouse for some time. I assure and can almost bet all-in on it that your machine had Vista Pre-SP1 on it and was also behind on driver release dates.

I am sorry for the experience you have had but I have Vista running on even an 2 year old Dell D810 laptop and I have had not a single issue with the operating system, yes there are some compatibility issues with drivers and applications. Many have jumped on the Vista hate train but for no reason. XP has been out for 5 years and as of June 30th 2008 it has finally pulled into the station and is ready to retire. Vista is the new bullet train and its a new beast for sure. With new operating sytems come new issues at hand, XP if you all remember was the target of the hate train when it first came out as well.

I really think and would hope you will give it another try instead of letting your hardware go to waste.

thanks