You raise some good points, Greg. I don’t have a problem with the Windows Genuine Advantage program: Microsoft has a right to validate that I own a license for their product before they let me download updates and so forth. But the “trusted computing” and playback channel encryption stuff that they added to the OS in order to satisfy the movie and record industry borders on the ludicrous.

I suspect these things bother me less than some folks because I don’t use my computer to watch movies. So most of what I experience with Vista relates to the user interface and security features. I’m perhaps a little odd in that I appreciate the value of the extra security, including UAC. I feel these features are long overdue, and don’t find the prompts for privilege elevation to be terribly intrusive. Mind you, I use Linux GUIs like KDE and Gnome regularly, and am used to the “root privileges required” prompts from that environment. One thing that these prompts clearly reinforce for me is the fact that there are far too many programs for Windows, particularly games, that require elevated privileges simply to run. That is poor design on the part of the software authors: they’ve gotten used to having full and complete control of the machine. This is particularly true of the copy protection schemes used by these games, which try to run as core parts of the OS to block or encrypt access to the CD/DVD drive. That is really pretty scary stuff- what is a game doing taking over low level device drivers?

As for the hardware developers…there hasn’t been a major change in Windows driver requirements for five or six years. The hardware manufacturers had a couple of years while Vista was in beta to comply with the new driver architecture. Microsoft has been saying for years that over 80% of the customer problems they receive are ultimately traced to incorrect or badly written hardware device drivers. I can attest to this myself: I’ve been in server and workstation support for a couple of decades, and have observed first hand how hardware drivers can mis-behave. The new driver architecture in Vista is supposed to limit the damage a poorly developed driver can cause. I guess I’m a little less sympathetic towards the hardware companies than I could be.

Despite the fact that I like many aspects of Vista, I can’t say I’d recommend someone who is happily using XP should upgrade. I’ve been telling my friends and family that there is no real reason to upgrade, and lots of reasons not to. My suggestion to them is to upgrade when they buy a new computer, unless or until there is something hardware or software wise that they really want that only works under Vista. This is a big difference from the Windows 95 to Windows XP transition: I was strongly recommending folks upgrade that time.