To tell you the truth I don't know what's worse at this point. The garbage system vendors put on top of XP, the complete unsuitability of XP for a notebook type system or the garbage hardware 90% of PC makers design and release.

My GF just got a new notebook with her recent promotion, an Acer Travelmate of some sort. If you were to read the spec sheet it sounds nice. It has all the ports and bells and whistles. But when you take stock of the physical machine it's a design nightmare.

Why would anyone put ports on the FRONT of the machine? I haven't seen physical switches for Bluetooth and WiFi do anything but cause people problems. Who needs so many LEDs on a notebook?

The thing that's pissing me off the most right now is that at some random point after closing the clamshell, the machine will seemingly wake up and start playing some tune. Or just sit there on the desktop ON. The power settings have been taken over by some Acer application (so that you can no longer see the default OS UI for it). But the power option for clamshell close is definitely set to Standby (sleep).

When the machine was first turned on there were no fewer than 15 icons in the tray and another 3 or 4 next to, but outside of the tray. Who was it that said most applications don't install stuff to the tray on Windows? Yeah right. ATI's own craptastic tray icon was there - but at least that one can be disabled from Catalyst Control Center (a huge pile of steaming usability crap itself).

I do two things with Windows right now. One is run my SageTV in my living room (it's the only TV tuner & PVR I use - media PC case with 800GB of HD). The other is to run Canada Post shipping software for my business which is done on a Shuttle system. If I could buy an Intel Mac notebook today I'd be running that software inside a virtual machine.

But these days, the only thing I hate more than having to run Windows is installing Windows. So I don't see Vista in my immediate future. Down the road if I can keep the business going and eventually exppand into some Windows-based software I'll no doubt also do some development/testing with it - likely on Apple hardware.

Looking forward to moving one of my servers to Linux and eventually being able to move my TV/PVR system to Linux as well.