Microsoft's heir apparent has had its fair share of negative publicity since launch. In fact, I dare say it's had two or three operating systems' worth of negative publicity. Since the last versions of Vista I played with were a beta and a release candidate, I didn't really have an up-to-date opinion on the whole matter. Recently I was given the opportunity to purchase a copy of the flagship product, Windows Vista Ultimate, at an employee price from an acquaintance that works for Microsoft. I took it.

Many of you have read my rants and know that I'm not exactly a big Microsoft fan. I use Windows XP for the odd game here and there but by and large most of my daily tasks are performed using Ubuntu Linux. I will not perform a feature-by-feature comparison between Vista Ultimate and Ubuntu however. I'm going to treat this as a rant like any other, with largely the same criteria I use for other operating systems.

If there's one thing Microsoft can afford to do when they're charging retail customers $200-300USD a pop, it's make the packaging pretty. The box and DVDs for Vista were quite pleasant and sparkly. The booklet (inside the box behind the discs) was relatively short, basically just outlining some new features in Vista over previous versions and giving basic pointers on upgrades and clean installs. The product key is actually stuck to the back side of the slide-out tray. I didn't catch it at first until I read the little instruction booklet.

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