It’s interesting that every article and comment on the internet seems to disparage Vista. There’s something strange about that, for me, I like Vista. No, really. It does everything with excellent stability; it doesn’t crash and so far hasn’t gotten viruses or spyware. Plus, it’s shiny, shiny is nice.

Let me list the ways in which it does NOT suck.

DRM – What DRM, I haven’t noticed DRM; I don’t think most if any users will notice DRM. If there is Digital Rights Management in Vista then it’s working fairly unobtrusively. In actual fact, Windows Weekly 39 indicates that it’ll only run on WMP’s start up. If you use iTunes or VLC, nothing. Also, it doesn’t poll the drives either.

Stability – Unlike Ubuntu, it hasn’t crashed yet. Neither does it randomly forget it has a hard drive.

Drivers – Unlike Ubuntu, Sabayon or pretty much everything. It supports all the hardware on every machine out of the box. The drivers run pretty well too and they’re updated with decent regularity on windows update.

Shiny – It’s shiny. It doesn’t have the cool effects that Compiz supports but unlike Compiz, I haven’t felt the need to switch them off because they’re too irritating either. Also, they haven’t crashed yet; point to them.

UDF CD Burning – Yeah, Linux has supported it for years but only in a theoretical way. Windows formats RW disks in UDF by default. This enables you to slot in a disk and pretty much drag and drop files to it, they’re written on the fly. If you delete or edit them, that’s re-burned on the fly too.

Video Driver Reset – There’s a function present to reset the video drivers if they’re hacked or they crash. Well unlike Ubuntu where your X will lock up completely if you play the wrong movie. (Had it happen, don’t bother denying it does). It will pop back up in less than half a second. Really, you barely notice it.

Printers Work – I add a printer, it works. It has a built in scanner and works too. There’s software to scan with included.

Software – There’s software to do what you need. Sometimes you need to look something up on a checked encyclopedia. Wikipedia is great when I want a synopsis of the Gundam Seed anime but not when I want to read about something like the Russian Revolution, or a detailed espousal of Programming Language theory. There’s no Encarta for Linux.

OpenGL – It works perfectly in Vista.

Flash – It works, with sound, without crashing the system.

Java – Also works.

Also, the custom keys on my mouse, laptop and keyboards work just fine. Would be nice if Ubuntu remapped the buttons properly.

The biggest problem is the resource usage. You really do need a fairly recent computer to run vista with any real success. Something with at least 1GB of RAM. That sucks but fair enough. Also, network performance is pretty lame/slow; I wouldn’t use Microsoft software in any critical system, like the central system of a Battleship for example. But then again I wouldn’t use Linux either. Not that it’s the point of this review, but I’d use Solaris or a real-time system.

You can choose to not use Vista because Linux is technologically or ideologically superior. Or because Microsoft was just discovered bribing Nigerian officials. Hate it for plenty of reasons, but in the “Information Age”, they should be real reasons.