There’s no doubt that Windows Vista is meeting with resistance from the computing market as a whole. I can attest that Vista is better than XP, but don’t even think about running it on something that isn’t close to state of the art. Furthermore, I don’t think the gains it offers are enough to make it a worthwhile purchase over XP. In fact, I think that the majority of people would be served just fine by a computer running some sort of Linux, Ubuntu being the most likely candidate. With all this reticence to Vista, people are instead putting their hope in the Windows version that would come after Vista, which at this point would most likely be the seventh version (unless they pull an XP and make it 6.1 like they made XP 5.1). People are putting so much faith in Windows 7 that they seem to be distorting the reality of the situation and how they should attack it. As with any computer purchase, the correct procedure is not to wait, but to buy what is needed, when it’s needed. It makes no sense to wait if there is an urgent need to get new equipment. Furthermore, what has Microsoft done in the past that would warrant the faith that this next version will be better? Every version of Windows has needed more powerful equipment than the one that proceeded it. Every version of Windows, to a worsening degree, places program compatibility above nearly everything else, the only exception being User Account Control, which although being the right decision probably could have been better implemented and has elicited horror from many users. Since Windows 95 Microsoft has made only small changes to their Windows user interface, with almost all of them being limited to the Start menu. So, given all of these things, why are people falling for this? It makes no sense to hope for change in a company where it has delivered very little thats been different over it’s history.