But I’m not convinced by this. I’ve been using Vista in anger since the day of its release, and have long since given up Windows XP because I found I got most things done much more quickly with Vista in place.

So it came as a bit of a culture shock when, this weekend, I had brief cause to fire up a netbook. And although there are lots of things that Microsoft royally messed up in Vista, this drummed home to me just how basic XP is in comparison.

The most obvious example is launching programs. If you go outside the comfort zone that is the Quick Launch bar in XP, finding a program is a pain – sure, if you know the .exe filename then Windows +R will let you run it quite quickly, but otherwise you’ve got to dig around in the mess that is nested menus. With Vista, you just type in the keyword and a shortlist of likely apps (or documents) appears.

On a laptop, Vista is the obvious choice. Microsoft itself admits that hibernate and standby didn’t work particularly well in XP, while it takes a matter of two or three seconds to have your whole system up and running again when you resume from standby in Vista. If you’re anal enough to delve into the deeper dialog boxes, you can also take an incredible amount of control over battery-saving settings.

These are just examples. Vista’s out-of-the-box security is quantifiably superior to XP’s, the user accounts are easier to manage, the bundled apps like Windows Mail, Calendar and DVD Maker are actually quite pleasant to use, the built-in parental controls are excellent, and of course the interface is prettier. 

I’m not pretending for a second that Vista is a stunning success. There are many things Microsoft screwed up: Explorer’s interface is not only fiddly but on occasion actually obtrusive, to the extent that negotiating your way around a network is much, much easier in XP. User Account Control is one of those Good Ideas In A Meeting that unfortunately failed to take into account human behaviour. And Microsoft over-interfered in some areas that were working perfectly well, like making it more difficult to connect to a wireless network.

But there are ways around all of these problems, and in the end they’re annoyances rather than obstacles. So why, exactly, is the press and blog coverage of Vista almost universally negative? Why does every forum post I see slag it off?

Now I don’t have any issue with people highlighting Vista’s faults – they’re numerous, just as they are with most operating systems. What I do take issue with is people dismissing a whole operating system on the basis of broad-brush statements like “it’s rubbish”.

Some bits of it are rubbish, but so are some bits of Ubuntu Linux, Apple OS X, Windows XP. And there are lots more aspects of Vista that have been described as rubbish, when often the criticiser is just more used to the way of doing things the way XP (for example) did them. 

At the risk of opening myself up to even more abuse than usual, let me know. What don’t you like about Vista? What do you like? Have you decided not to even give it a try on the basis of comments elsewhere? Perhaps you’ve been pleasantly surprised (or otherwise) after buying a Vista laptop.

Post your thoughts below, while I go and get some sort of protective shield to hide behind…

In fact, Microsoft will argue that the migration will be tougher if users have not moved to Vista already. Now that I can accept, although the migration to Vista from XP will remain a time consuming and problematical one for many people. It seems almost unfair to expect them to go through that twice, so why not wait until Windows 7 and just do it once?

Well, there’s always the better security argument I guess, which has some substance of course, but beyond that I am not getting much feedback from the small business types I meet that suggests there is any real world motivation to make the move. In fact, the business-oriented feedback I get can be best summed up as ‘even though it’s broke, migrating to Vista won’t fix it.’

Joking aside, Microsoft does have a point. Forget whether you choose to believe the corporate VP of Windows product management Mike Nash when he says in the paper’s executive summary that the device and application compatibility situation in Vista is now dramatically better than it was, the thing you have to really think about is whether it will be any better at all if you just wait for the next point release of the OS to come along instead. History would suggest not on your nelly. Nash himself, if an email that was disclosed during the discovery phase of the Vista Capable marketing class action suite is to be believed, knows all about the problems of migration to Vista. Apparently Nash wrote, referring to hardware requirements when upgrading to Vista, that he “got burnt” and ended up with “a $2100 email machine.”

“So, XP – is it really going this time?”

“Yes, definitely,” our Vista man replied. “We’ve extended the deadline once, we can’t keep XP alive for ever.”

Less than 48 hours later, and a journalist in Belgium pops the same question to someone slightly higher up the Microsoft hierachy – Steve Ballmer – who replies:

“If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter…”

Someone set the alarm clock.