Originally Posted by Dave Brockman
I'm going to do my best not to sound like a PC-fanboi, but wil probably fail miserably! Anyway, here goes...
"Macs just work"? So do PCs. There's a lot of rubbish talked about Vista's unreliability, incompatibilty, bloat and speed, almost all of which are RTFM issues.
In my opinion Microsoft dropped a ball in releasing it slightly too early - there were some glitches that SP1 solved - and a lot of hardware manufacturers bundled it on wholly unsuitably-specced machines.
Add this to the perceived annoyance of UAC by people who didn't understand it, and the frustratingly slow indexing of files (once only) and you can perhaps appreciate why Vista quickly gained a poor reputation.
On a halfway sensible machine Vista zipps along happily. I'm running 32-bit Home Premium on a Dell laptop with a mere 2GB RAM (sorry Daniel!) and it's lightning fast.
"Faffing about with 3rd party software"? All of my old hardware worked instantly with no driver updates; the one and only piece of software which didn't was so creaking and old that I'd have replaced it anyway (an MP3 editor, since you ask). I understand that there were a few early issues with incompatible hardware but that's down to lazy manufacturers, not Microsoft.
Anyway, it's horses for courses. If a Mac does what you want it to, and you can find the software which fits your needs, then go for it. Likewise a PC. I honestly don't know why the subject so often creates such polarisation! :D