are you seriously surprised by this? The PC industry has spent years and countless man hours making things easy to use, yet still powerful for users like us to do whatever we want with the tech. Then comes along apple and tells us that the great progress we've made is all worth shit, we need isolated apps and don't need to interconnect any which device we want, who needs that stuff? And the general population eats it up like its a free krsipy kreme donut! Sure apple perfected the touchscreen and snazzy animations, but I can't help but think they've set us back so far in terms of computing advancement, and will remain that way so long as their app store model maintains a foothold.

you realize that pressing Alt brings the full menu back into view right? and you can easily make it stay there permanently if you wanted to. I see no reason to keep it in the default view to take up screen real estate when most people use it so rarely.

I vacuum and dust my case frequently, probably once a month. It's pristine inside.

Normally I would agree, the graphics card should be able to handle anything that is thrown at it, but there is something to this story. I have a radeon 4850 with one of these zalman coolers on it http://www.quietpcusa.com/images/vf1000-led.jpg and my case is big with lots of cooling. I have used this exact same configuration to play countless games over the last year, including MW2, BC2, etc. and never had a single crash. But now my system is crashing at the SC2 menus. My brother's machine is doing the exact same thing. Perhaps because the rendering is so simple, it's causing the card to go faster than the designers intended, causing extreme heat in one specific part of the pipeline. Anyhow, the fix mentioned in the article does solve the problem for me.

We're you also startled at how primitive it was? Sure the basics of launching programs has remained the same, but virtually everything else besides that has gotten better, both in the guts and on the interface. You can't do all those nifty new things and expect things not to use more resources and not slow down at all. You take advantage of the hardware you have afforded to you and I believe modern operating systems do just that.

The real reason why things feel sluggish at times is because most people are still using mechanical hard disks and they are the one single component that has not advanced nearly as fast as all the other components of a PC. Switch to an SSD and come back and talk to me about responsiveness.

This is a perfect example of what Linus described in a previous article about why Linux on the Desktop is failing. "better is worse if it's different." Just reading through this article it's very clear how stuck in his ways Bennett really is. By his own admission, nothing was fundamentally wrong with Vista in his experience, just that things were different from what he was used to.

Virtual PC runs just fine on Vista Home Premium edition. You just get nag boxes coming up telling you that it's unsupported, but it works just fine.