[ChrisRabior]

If you remember, a well patched win95 was better than the first release of win98. Same as win98 to win98se, then to win2k, and winME, and winXP, and all of the service packs in between.

Anyone who thought Vista would be a good idea right off the shelf was incredibly silly and sorely mistaken. Despite our expectations of a fully functional software, the product you get right out of the box is often junk when it's bought from MS. Look at XP. XP was buggy until SP2, and even then still had some quirks.

I recently took the plunge on a laptop preloaded w/ Vista (with the comfort that I can install the copy of XP I bought in college if it doesn't work out). I'm happy with it. It works fine for me, but that was only after it installed like 125 updates (literally.. it took a TON of restarting and such to get the thing up to date).

Now, as for my older laptop.. it's likely getting ubuntu installed so I can run all of my freebies and have eternally free updates =)