Vista's biggest (and IMO, only) problem is the huge decrease in performance from XP. If you're a gamer, DirectX 10 can mitigate some of that, as can the increase in support for 64bit compatibility that Vista ushered in (64bit = more ram = potentially better performance), but it's still disappointing that Vista is so sluggish by comparison.

The good news is that, even with some of the new features in Windows 7 (I really love the new task bar and aero peak, for example), it's supposedly outperforming Vista at the same time in a variety of benchmarks. I see the switch from XP->Vista->Win7 as an analog more to the switch from 3.1->95->98. 3.1 was stable and fast and well supported at the time. Windows 95 was buggy, and the performance was poor, and since the major change was largely cosmetic, I know a lot of people who skipped 95 altogether. 98 was essentially a reskin of 95, but it did a lot of things better and went on to be one of the more stable and long lived OSes in MS' history. Only time will tell if Win7 follows in it's footsteps.

This isn't true at all.

The theory of alienation actually says the opposite. As I understand it, the theory of alienation states that by being paid for your labor (and, especially, since the capitalist claims the surplus value of your labor), you become "alienated" from the joys of labor.

This is part of the reason why paying people per unit of production rather than per unit of time tends to result in better productivity. It gives people a sense of worth that doesn't exist in other systems.

Marxist communism just would like to see the means of production moved from the capitalist (those who seek to increase their own wealth) to the laborer (those who seek to produce things).

It's just a shame that communism always seems to go hand in hand with centralized government in practice, because those two things will never work together.