[NCxM50]

The bad rap that Vista continues to get amazes me. Particularly when people continually compare it to how "stable" XP is. Of course XP is stable, it's been around for the better part of a decade, and has had more updates that Joan Rivers face.
Truth is, before the release of SP1 (which was already in deveolpment when XP went gold), XP was a blue screen monster. The general public got an OS that had a hard time running anything other then MS Office without taking a dump in it's own shorts. But, compared to ME, it was the best thing since sliced bread.
At the time of XP's release, Windows 98 was stable too, but it had compatibility issues that couldn't be overcome without a kernel overhaul, and it didn't have the security required to meet things like HIPAA standards. For companies who needed that security, they only had two options at the time, and that was XP Pro, or NT 4.0 workstation, which was already close to ancient (in terms of computing) at that point, and horribly incompatible with modern productivity software and the (then) up and coming popularity of external drives and storage sources. XP became the norm in the workplace, and hence, became the norm in the home, because people were comfortable with it.

Truth is, that on the day it went gold, Vista was far more stable than XP at the same stage in it's life. It's primary problem was that it was/is a severe memory hog, which can be fixed in under 15 minutes. A handful of changes will have Vista running on less than half a gig of memory with little to no impact on functionality (unless you really like flash, smoke, and mirrors, in which case, you're SOL)
Microsofts biggest problem is that they misjudged the general public. They made decisions based on the people who more or less drive technology in the computer industry, gamers. Unfortunately, gamers tend to be more computer savvy than the general public through forced necessity (anyone who managed to get Falcon 4.0 or MS Flight Simulator to run on an "avg" PC at the time of it's release knows what I'm talking about here) So MS designed Vista with a computer savvy public in mind, and didn't realize that most folks want to yank the computer out of the box, and have it do amazing things as soon as they plug it in. Vista would have done much better had they made it clear that the OS was best used by someone who needed advanced media library capabilities, wanted to do video editing and couldn't afford a Mac or high end software, and gamers. If you are none of the above, XP is more than sufficient for any use you might have for a computer.