Don't Fear Change, Embrace It

I almost feel like I need to put on some latex exam gloves to even deal with this subject, but here I go. It seems like very forum I visit these days, and even in some discussions I have with people I hang out with, everyone is talking about Windows Vista & how terrible it is. Why is it that, in the mind of the public, every new version of Windows is evil and worse than the last? When XP came out, everyone was griping and holding on to 98, because XP was bug-ridden and slowed everyone's processors to a crawl, so matter how much memory they had... and on & on. I'm hearing the same thing, now, about Vista & everyone is saying how much better XP is.

Ok.

I got a new computer from Dell in September. It, of course, came with Vista. It also has an Inspiron 531s, Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz, 512Kx2) processor & 2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz. I'm not running slowly, I have had no problems with Vista & it's bugs, at least not any more than I had with XP. Yes, it was annoying to be asked permission to do everything, all the time. At least it was at first, I got used to it. I had a few problems getting my widescreen monitor set at the right resolution, but that was an issue with my video card that I fixed with an outside program and not one with Vista. It's possible that people are trying to run Vista without having dual core processors, or enough memory, all I know is that it runs my games way better than XP ever did, and I played the same games on my old machine.

Why does everyone fear change so much? Why do they assume that a computer runs slowly because of the OS instead of investigating other possible causes first? If mine starts running slowly, I know it's time to scan for adware again & defrag. I keep a very clean machine, I uninstall programs I'm not using, I clean my disk regularly & defrag often, so the minute it bogs down, I know there's something on there that doesn't belong. Change isn't always a big, scary thing, it just takes getting used to. Yes, we all like our comfort zone, but XP isn't going to be what runs everything forever, just like 98 wasn't. Sometimes I think people just won't take the time to get used to a new OS because it takes them outside their comfort zone. They race back to what they know & dismiss the new.

To me, it's very akin to people who assume every noise they hear in an old house is a ghost, when they ought to be trying to find out a physical reason for it first, you know?