Vista has got to go.
I’ve finally reached the end of my teather with Vista and it has got to go. Why? Not because of UAC, the constant RAM useage of 900MB with nothing else running, the rebooting without prompting me to save whenever windows update feals like it or the fact the a third of my PC games won’t run on it. It’s going because I played two games of minesweeper last night and both times minesweeper crashed (“Minesweeper is not responding”), before I got to the end of the game, in response to me doing nothing more than right-clicking on a square to mark it as a mine (and yes, I did let it send the crash reports off to MS).
On a not entirely unrelated note I spent Monday afternoon slipstreaming SP3 and last Thursday’s emergency hot fix into an OEM XP Pro CD (having discovered I didn’t have an OEM disk at home after taking my boss’s laptop home to reinstall it) using nLite. It was surprising easy and having a CD into which I only have to type the product key and the owner information to get a properly localised British XP install was a very nice experience. One thing I don’t understand is why Microsoft cannot supply localised install disks in the first place. I appreciate that there would be additional cost in producing the different disks but Microsoft is large enough and should be profitable enough to be able to do that. Failing that they could always re-write the installer so that once I tell it I’m in the UK it automatically sets they keyboard, timezone and language preferences (like most Linux distributions) rather that me having to change it in 5 different places.
Oh, incidentally, I am still alive 
.