heh, Vista's reputation for instability came from the nVidia drivers 
Plus a host of other drivers, plus a lot of software written for older OS's (=anything older than Vista), plus a lot of software written for the blood thing. Don't blame one manufacturer for Microsoft's failures.
Sourcenvlddmkm.dll gave me a shitload of trouble, and was the sole cause of nearly every bluescreen I've seen on this box. (others include trying to access protected memory, overheats, and having one program try to access the active memory of another ( Tweak for Dwarf Fortress)).
I did say reputation; I actually like Vista/win7, since I got rid of that 8800GTS it's been steady as a rock - also, I can natively play games that XP wouldn't touch (stuff like Epic 40k - Final Liberation).
Alas, my 3870 is atrocious under Debian or Fedora.
heh, Vista's reputation for instability came from the nVidia drivers
Plus a host of other drivers, plus a lot of software written for older OS's (=anything older than Vista), plus a lot of software written for the blood thing. Don't blame one manufacturer for Microsoft's failures.
Microsloth should be blamed for all incompatibility issues. An OS should be capable of running any Windows based program that is installed, without glitches, bugs or errors. They finally got it right with XP (although it still took them awhile) so why in fuck's name did they bother trying to improve it? XP should have been the final standard, then every edition afterward could have just been a ver X.xx.
A lot of older programs assume they will be running with privileges - the ability to write to wherever they please. That's a bad thing from a security standpoint, and it's also terrible coding practice.
64bit XP sucks balls. Also, XP doesn't (or didn't) utilise multicored processors as efficiently as it could.
Vista also has a poor mans -su in the form of UAC.
