Vista's problems go way beyond what we see here. Everybody should look at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html for some enlightenment about how MS has hosed everybody for the sake of DRM.

I first got interested in the issue when testing Vista on a second HD in my system saw an increase in WinAmp CPU (I like to listen to KPLU Internet jazz while I work) showed my CPU utilization when nothing but WinAmp was running jumped from 5% - 10% in XP to 40% - 50% in Vista and DVD's went from excellent at ~40% CPU to unwatchable at 100% solid CPU on the same hardware. (I'm using 1.8 GHz P4, 1GB RAM, new Radeon 1650 PRO DirectX 9 graphics adapter, but I've seen complaints from folks w/ 3.2GHz CPU's, 2GB RAM and serious gaming video cards.) My background CPU use when nothing is running has gone from ~2% to ~10%. (Note, however, that I have FAR more extra background tasks and services running in XP than Vista, including WinFax!)

What does this have to do with us? It's the extreme overhead Vista requires of all device drivers in the system primarily to satisfy the entertainment industry! As the article describes, it creates huge CPU overhead while making hardware more expensive and less resilient to minor things like hickups in bus voltage. Also, if you want hardware acceleration to work with video cards in Vista, then the drivers have to honor DRM even when you are not playing a DVD. (Note that means you have to have at least DirectX9 acceleration even if you don't watch videos, which is why I had to buy a new card!)

Meanwhile, the real pirates continue to hack Blu Ray and HD DVD using Linux on boxes that cost less than half what we need just to run Vista even without the Aero eye candy.

Remember when MS-DOS and relatively cheap hardware beat the pants off the Mac in large part because everything was open, fast and cheap? Well that is changing more with Vista than with any other "upgrade" MS has come out with!