I'm building a new machine for my mum; a dual core low-power AMD64 to replace her wheezing old 1GHz Athlon. The system runs fine on Ubuntu Linux, provided I use the latest ATI drivers and not the ones Ubuntu itself ships with (hint: apt-get install envyng-gtk).
Anyway, I put Windows Vista on it to see what it's like. What a clusterfuck. First, the installer is slow as shit; boot the DVD, and it treats you to an colourful screen with nothing but a mouse pointer to start with for the first 40 seconds or so. Long delays like this with zero disk activity are common with it for some reason.
About five reboots later, I have a desktop; I install the critical updates for it, reboot again, install the ATI drivers, reboot again, install SolSuite and Opera, and think the end is in sight. To finish it off before I prepare to migrate her email, I turn on Automatic Updates. Oh, two more updates to install? Um, OK, I guess it's doing the "Recommended" ones I ignored.
Reboot number 7; the system fails to boot. It gets to fading in "Microsoft Corporation" and simply hangs. Safe mode does the same; right after crcdisk.sys loads, all disk activity stops and the system locks solid. Well done, Microsoft QA.
Now, the true, unforgivable, what the fucking fuck aspect of this: the Windows Vista install DVD no longer boots. That's right, it hangs too, at roughly the same spot. Scouring the interwebs, this is apparantly not an uncommon issue; I expect I need to wipe the hard disk so it can no longer trip over whatever the last update fucked up. And this piece of shit retails at over 300?!
Hmm, I wonder how easy it would be to get SolSuite running under Wine…