A lot of people talk bad about Windows Vista. I made the switch to Windows Vista back in March despite a bunch of Mac users telling me to do otherwise. I'll come back to them. The only real complaints I have so far are the messages. They're all over the place asking or stating the painfully obvious. There's one in particular: "$Programtitle has stopped working."
Hmm. My program stopped working. Well maybe that would explain why it's no longer on my screen or in my little windows bar at the bottom. It's worse when you're in the middle of something important and you haven't clicked the save button as often as you should because you got lulled to sleep by XP's smooth seas and the program unexpectedly closes; while you pound your fists on the wall about lost data, Vista offers consolation in informing you the specifics of the problem - it stopped working.
It doesn't tell you about some kernel dump or some bad .dll file. It doesn't give you hexadecimal gibberish or even a little box that says that it's collecting your personal data to be sent off to Microsoft to keep you from doing that again. Instead, your desktop sits there in pristine condition while your computer works furiously as if you had just turned it on. (They just found a way to hide the blue screen of death.) It's got a killer quick start up time.
Another good thing about Vista is it's new. It's buggy. It's a challenge. It gives you a great excuse to be late.
I mentioned my Mac friends earlier. They're all really smart, so I'm sure there's something about Macs I don't get, but owning a Mac seems so pretentious unless you're a media artist, in which case, you are pretentious, but not for owning a Mac. I've used a Mac on several occasions and I can say I'm not impressed. First, it's buggy as hell. OS 10.Jaguar and that jungle kitten before it crashed for me as often as Windows 98 - the first edition. If you can find someone with Mac support you're still screwed because no one knows how to make a Mac not suck.
At least there's that desktop belt-buckle, now. Remember OS 9.2? You used to have to dig through hideous menus with few icons. Speaking of programs, when were you able to find Mac compatible programs? They're still not that common, but they were on the brink of extinction just a few years ago. I digress, Mac blows.
It all comes down to your personality type. If you're forty or older or have the computer skills of a sorority sister ("Why is there a dollar sign in front of that word?") you should stick to XP. If you're pretentious and/or trendy, just go for the Mac; it can only increase your pretentious/trendiness. Finally, if you enjoy a fair challenge in bettering the world for the next generations of Windows users while staying on top of the real future of computing, Vista beckons.
Author's note: No one needing advice on which OS to use would benefit from using Linux.
