There was a lot of negative hype surrounding Vista during its development.  It seemed that I heard nothing but bad things about it.  So naturally, I wasn't very excited for its release.  But being impartial as I am, I was willing to give it a chance.  So I asked some people who have used Vista some simple questions:  What advantage does Vista have over XP?  What are the new features besides the spiffy graphics?  The fact is that no one could give me a straight answer.  So for me, it wasn't worth spending that much money for something that really didn't seem to have any benefit.

Well, being an IT professional, I managed to get my hands on a free copy of Vista Ultimate.  Now that cost was not a factor, I installed it on my laptop.  Just as with XP SP2, I had to make numerous tweaks to get the interface right, a new one for Vista being disabling the annoying and useless "User Account Control", of course.  Besides that, I had no problems with hardware compatibility or anything else.  In fact, I made quite a surprising discovery...

Vista is fast.  I thought the extra graphical effects would slow down the interface, but in fact, it's significantly more responsive.  Programs load and close much faster.  I've even experienced faster file transfer rates over my home network.

Microsoft just might have made a believer out of me.  And if you think about it, it makes sense.  XP has been around for over 6 years, and has since been hacked to pieces and bloated with thousands of updates.  Vista seems fresh and light-weight in comparison, with many of its sub-systems rewritten to work well with modern hardware.

So why all the fuss?  Do people not like change?  Are they afraid they won't be able to do as many illegal things anymore?  Are they upset that Vista won't work with their ancient hardware?  Welcome to the world of computers.  Things change.  Get with the program and upgrade your stone-age Pentium.

I used to agree with people who criticize Microsoft's business tactics.  What I realized, though, is that all of Microsoft's competitors are doing all the same things, and nobody points the finger at them and complains.  Microsoft gets picked on because they're the biggest.  I, for one, do not use Microsoft's products because I am somehow conned into it or because it is the most popular standard.  For instance, I used Java and IBM WebSphere and Eclipse for quite some time at one job I had.  Yet, the reason I prefer .NET, C#, and Visual Studio is because they are, in my opinion and for very specific reasons, better.  So yes, Microsoft is a formidable foe for competitors because they make really, really good software, and Vista is no exception.

So in conclusion, don't knock Vista until you've tried it.

Come on, people, seriously.  You'd think that since Windows became a stand-alone operating system starting with Windows 95 some 13 years ago, they would have figured this out by now.  Why haven't any of the Windows releases since then incorporated being able to reconfigure the operating system without ever restarting?

Now it used to be that the whole "You have to restart your computer for these changes to take effect" thing was just a mild nuisance.  Unless it involved drivers, you could just click "No, I'll restart my computer later" and what do you know?  You don't even have to restart your computer half the time.

Has this improved at all in recent years?  No, in fact, it has gotten worse!  There are now artificial measures intentionally put in place to force users to restart.  For instance, after installing Windows updates, you will be prompted every 10 minutes or so that you have to restart until you do.  Or when a program is installed, it will not let you install another program until your computer is restarted.

Device drivers aside, as a developer for the past 10 years, I have never encountered a scenario where any installation step involved in installing a program could not possibly be done without restarting.  Why are users still being required to restart?  Is it because developers are too lazy to figure out how to enable the program to function without restarting?  Is it a "just in case" measure to reduce technical support calls?  Or maybe it has just become tradition.  In any case:

If your installation process requires restarting, your installation process was poorly designed and needs to be reworked.

This is, of course, unless restarting is necessitated by some external factor, in which case, said external factor (e.g. Windows) is a product of a poor design and I hope the designers (e.g. Microsoft) gets grilled for their gross negligence until they correct it.

Home users may simply find this annoying, but when you talk about servers, many of them must be kept up during certain hours, which means that some poor technician has to come in early, stay late, or spend part of his weekend performing updates to the servers, or else the company has to suffer a loss in productivity or even business during the time that the server is being restarted.  This is unacceptable when there is no reason why installing a program cannot be done without restarting.