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Or should I say Ubuntu vs Vista? :-). So what happend? Well, I've been using Vista Enterprise on my desktop machine for some time now. It used to run pretty okay, well okay as far as that goes for a WinSystem.

Once in a while I had to reboot or got a BSoD but it seemed to recover pretty well. No notable problems there. Also the speed was good for running a 'non-vista-ready' system (AMD X2 4200+, 3GB DDR RAM, NVidia 7900GTO, etc etc...). But yesterday, when getting the machine out of standby, it just suddenly rebooted without any good reason. When loading the system I suddenly got the freaky message that the Windows kernel was missing or corrupt. Strange thing is, about 30 mins before, it was all working fine.

A couple of reboot later (Last Known Good Configuration & Safe Mode didn't work of course), I decided to give up. Lucky me, I'm a careful person so I had an installed Ubuntu (8.04) ready. Loaded into this, and yay, I had a working machine again.

Logged on to the GNOME and a couple of minutes later the machine was already performing an update of all the necessary components. After about 5 minutes, just had to do a little reboot (kernel upgrade), et voila, a perfect working machine with all the latest gadgets and tools.

My conclusion for Vista is, if you don't really need it, don't use it. Although I'm not a Windows-hater, and I still use Vista on my work-laptop, I'm considering not repairing it anymore on my desktop. I've already wasted too much time. Again, I'm not against Vista, and I actually honestly think that this is by far the best Windows version ever (so far at least, and when you look 'under the hood' as I do), but I just can't be bothered anymore. My professional life already consists of solving issues like this, so at least at home I don't want to be spending my time on it :P. With Linux, and especially Ubuntu, becoming more user-friendly by the day, I strongly recommend everyone who faces similar issues like me to consider the switch. Nowadays you don't need to be a die-hard fan anymore, in fact, I think at least with Ubuntu the average computer user, but even power users like myself, are better of!