I recently got a note out of the blue from another technology journalist. He wrote, "I know I'm often critical of Linux, but I'm SOOOOO GLAD I installed Ubuntu on my laptop. I installed some patches to Vista and now Vista won't boot, not even in Safe mode. Uggh!"

Is Windows Vista the biggest PR failure in Microsoft's history?

A few days ago i published a short article describing how Windows Vista would accept incorrect passwords at the login screen. Now, as if God/Microsoft her/himself had intervened, my Vista connected to the network, installed some unspecified update, and the password problem is solved. The weird thing is - Vista refuses to connect to my WLAN, so it shouldn't have been able to get any updates.

I take a live-and-let-live approach to computers that aren't mine. But this changed a few days ago when my father got a new laptop that had Vista pre-installed. He asked me to set things up for him and, to cut a long story short, he got Ubuntu 9.04.

When I started at the new job in August, they gave me a pretty powerful laptop and since the company I work for is 100% windows, I decided to give Vista a shot. I've been using it exclusively for about 1.5 months, from the beginning of August to the mid-September, every day, 40 hours a week. I also installed Ubuntu at that time.

The title pretty much says it all. It's an article that tells you howto Ubuntu look like Windows Vista. I did this on my mum's laptop and she thought I'd put vista back on there.

"After talking about it for awhile, last night I disconnected my drive with Vista installed on it and reconnected a 30GB Maxtor drive which I then installed Ubuntu Linux on from the live CD. "

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and Vista on a laptop.

In cases where computers are available pre-installed with either Linux or Windows, it is almost always the case that either (a) the Linux one is slightly less expensive or (b) the Windows one is actually less expensive, so you might as well just buy the Windows version and install Linux. Apparently, this is not always the case.