I overheard a discussion yesterday where a bunch of girls were trying to figure out if it's worth waiting a few months for the release of Windows 7 before buying a new PC. One girl really enjoyed ranting on about the massive Vista flop. Her main points were:

• It's an incomplete OS that Microsoft released too early.
• It contains a lot of strange processes in the background that slows it down, for instance Adobe Reader.
• Windows 7 is going to be a better OS.

These are the standard-line criticisms people always use against Vista. Like many popular lines of criticisms like "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and "democracy is the least worst form of government we have," it's all bullshit. Here's why:

• Microsoft may have released it "too early," whatever that means, but today there are two Service Packs available and tons of updates to the core system. Vista is not an incomplete OS. Anyone who says so don't know what they're talking about. Looking at the desktop interface changes, multimedia support, troubleshooting system and core stability, Vista is as solid as a Windows edition has ever been.
• Those "strange processes" aren't that strange. If you install Adobe Reader, Quicktime or similar software, they will execute small processes running in the background to make the main programs start up faster. You can easily disable this, but in reality, if you have 2 GB+ of memory, will 2 MB really cost you performance? Probably not. Anyway, there aren't any strange processes in Vista compared to previous editions; each process carries a system description in the task manager. Only standard processes to be found here.
• How would you know if a currently unreleased OS will beat Vista? You don't--you never know until it's actually released in final version. Until then, it's just a bunch of notes.

We can now see these rants for what they are: repetition of negative media propaganda. This propaganda machine, which began even before Vista had been released, is similar to that recently seen against Windows 7, which has been so fierce John C. Dvorak called it "orchestrated." To be fair, both the release and marketing of Vista were quite terrible, and many problems remain. But as a whole, Vista is a great OS offering an improved interface from XP together with a stability and performance equal to or better than 2000. It's solid, and after having used it for a longer period of time, I would choose this over XP any time.