Vista cycle of life

I have had Office 2007 for quite a while now but a workmate pointed out the SmartArt and I thought I would have some fun while we tried to repair his Dell M1330 that was infested with Microsoft Vista. Thank you Dell. There are plenty of articles around the net stating that Vista is slow, incompatible and buggy. Recently there have been articles stating that Vista marks the decline of Microsoft, and will advance the uptake of Linux/Ubuntu and Apple OS X. Certainly I am never one of the first people to uptake a new operating system, so I have hung off Vista while people go through the pain of a new Microsoft system. The wailing is not unfamiliar, I simply assume that these complainers do not have the memory from previous major version releases from Microsoft.

So my Microsoft Windows Vista experience is limited to solving this particular problem. Which was Vista trying to start, then resetting. I ran SpinRite over the drive and it came up OK. We tried to rescue the system a number of different ways that Vista allowed us to no avail. We tried to install Vista from scratch and still had errors, even after removing the whole partition. So a hardware issue, not a Vista problem. However Vista did not help any. This particular Dell M1330 needs a good going over.

I will try not to let this incident over ride my expectations of the next service pack edition of Vista. In the meantime I will not hold back on poking fun.