| And why don't they include Vista?
|
|
| Because all six people using Vista already upgraded from that crap.

I don't think there's really much difference between
Vista and 7. I think of them as the same OS. But
there are two factors that make them seem different:

1) It's easier to tone down the pointless nags in
Win7, making it appear to be smoother.

2) Microsoft screwed up the release of Vista. Intel
had a big pile of chipsets they wanted to dump, but
those chipsets couldn't support the demanding Aero
graphics. (The translucent techno-kitsch that was
the only real selling point of Vista/7.) So Microsoft
helped out their buddy, creating new categories of
vista at the last minute. The general public got very
confused, faced with choosing between PCs that
fully ran Vista and PCs that could run Vista but
couldn't do Aero. As a result, Vista got a bad
reputation.

Microsoft acted in a similar way with WinME. When
that version flopped they sort of swept it under the rug,
pretending that it just didn't exist. Now, for some time,
it's been Vista's turn to be the black sheep that no one
admits to. Yet if one just turns off User Account Control
in Vista I don't think there's much difference between
that and Win7. (Personally I avoid both. I occasionally use
Win7-64 for memory intensive things, but I prefer the
leaner, no-nonsense style of XP. It doesn't fight with
me about how I want to do things, and its spyware
functionality is less well developed.)