Windows Vista: Microsoft admits Vista failure

Expert advice... Hold off or be ready to troubleshoot.

I guess you can say I am one of the Geeks referred to earlier in this thread. I troubleshoot PCs on a daily basis as part of my job as a programmer. I haven't started running Vista personally yet because experience has taught me that running anything new from Microsoft is generally best done on a rather loaded, dedicated PC and typically involves some time troubleshooting. Not wanting to go out and build something new solely for this purpose I have decided to hold off and also wait for the multitude of bugs to get ironed out.
With that said, let me share with you the experience I had while helping a relative set up a wireless Internet connection after she bought a new HP laptop running Vista.
I had an old wireless router that I gave her so she would be able to get on the web and also access her email. Besides her new laptop she also had two older XP machines in her household to set up. I first set up the first XP machine which was a laptop with a built-in wireless card. This went very easily and the PC was connecting in no time flat. I then went on to the second XP machine that was a desktop which I had to add a network card. It went fairly straightforward and this PC was connected rather quickly as well. The last PC left to connect was the Vista machine.
Now logic would tell you that Vista, being Microsoft's latest and greatest, would be the easiest of the three PCs to get connected. Not so! Granted there is the new interface which I was unfamiliar with so that did add a little time for me to find what I was looking for but that wasn't the problem. I found the right screens OK but when I wanted to view the available wireless networks nothing came up at first. After refreshing the list I was finally seeing the router that I was expecting to see. I then tried to enter the proper security settings that I had set up on the router so the machine would connect. Right off the bat it didn't connect. It took another 20 minutes of looking through the various settins (which were already correct) before the wireless connection all of a sudden started working. I literally spent less time connecting the desktop PC that I had to open the case and add a network card to than it took me to get the Vista machine to connect. I guess you can say I wasn't real impressed! The thing I kept asking myself is why Microsoft even messed with the wireless networking functionality that works so well under XP when creating Vista? Besides the interface they seem to have started from scratch with respect to the wireless connectivity. Can you say "reinvent the wheel!" The good news is at least the connection has worked fine since the initial setup issue was ironed out.
This other thing I noticed on the brand new HP Vista laptop is the thing was incredibly slow for a brand new PC. I didn't dare say anything to my relative about the speed as she had just dropped $700.00 to $800.00 on this new machine which I knew is more than adequate to fulfill her needs. Now I keep reading these comments about blaming the manufacturers and not Microsoft... Give me a break! I wasn't even trying to add a piece of external hardware in this case and it was pretty obvious that the trouble wasn't hardware related. The hardware works fine. The software simply should have either been better designed or more thoroughly tested. There is no way an XP machine should be easier to connect to a wireless network than a Vista machine. If anything they should at least be equal!
In terms of hardware, the thing that comes to mind for me is when Windows 95 was released. No OS prior to 95 had as much effort put toward compatability and driver support. You would think Microsoft would have put the same effort forth with Vista. Going from Windows 3.1 to 95 the drivers were completely different because the OS had changed so much. Yes, 95 had its own issues but considering where Windows was at the time the driver support was entirely sufficient for everything I ran into with the exception of the old 8-bit add-in cards that already were dinosaurs at that point. The current driver support under XP is proven and reliable. Again, why fix what isn't broken. At the very least, Microsoft should have included backwards compatability with XP drivers in Vista - that way if a better Vista driver is not yet available the existing hardware people already own will still function. You would think after a five-year wait since their last OS release they would have figured some of this out!
My personal feeling is it is better to hold off until the bugs get worked out or go with one of the Intel based Macs and run XP if you are advanced enough for it. The really bad thing is from my experience and what I have been reading is Microsoft has left the novice user out in the cold. Not supporting something as simple as a printer nowadays is simply asking for bad press!