A growing number of people are getting locked into an endless reboot loop during upgrade, destroying their Vista installs and leaving them with no OS.

Woops.

Microsoft must be working day and night to try to resolve this issue, right? From TFA:

According to Microsoft’s head of support, however, the endless reboot problem isn’t on the company’s top list of concerns. “It’s very early in the process,” said Ben Bennett, the director of Microsoft’s Windows consumer global support group, in an interview Monday afternoon. “In terms of the top issues of customers who choose to upgrade, the XP-to-Windows 7 [upgrade] is up there on the list for lots of reasons. The netbook upgrade scenario — how do I upgrade my netbook to Windows 7 — is also a big one. And another is, ‘Where are my applications?’ after people have upgraded. They wonder what happened to e-mail and photo editing, for example. Those are the top issues so far.”

So, they’re more concerned with those upgrading from XP to 7.  Well, that makes sense.  I’m sure that was their plan all along.

At least I got to keep the paper hats and confetti.

XP was released on Oct 25, 2001 and Vista was released on Jan 30, 2007.  If 7′s released doesn’t get pushed back, that gives Vista’s life a duration of a little under two years. Development began on Vista in May of 2001, which gives us a span of almost 5 years.  They’ve touted Vista as the best selling, most secure and most successful operating sytem in Microsoft’s history.  Until they began pushing the adoption of 7.  Then they called Vista a necessary mistake; something they had to do to give the users what will be the best selling, most secure and most popular operating system they’ve ever developed.

Vista was XP’s ME.  Something they released as an interim release due to pressures from other OS manufacturer’s.  Just like ME, it was a stillborn and something that will go down in the annals of history as a screwup of epic proportions.

Which leads me to the following query; If Vista mimics the life of ME, will 7 follow the path of XP?  Say what you want, XP is usable.  Out of 7 computers in my house, 5 run XP.  I’ve bought extra copies of the OS for any future computers that end up here. Vista, which came on my gaming computer and on my wife’s work rig is slow and awkward.  I can’t imagine purposefully installing Vista.

Initially, it would seem that 7 will be what Vista should have been.  After all, 7 was being developed alongside of Vista(remember that Vista was an interim release).  When you take into account however that Steve Ballmer stated that 7 is a “revised” Vista, it tends to dampen your hopes that the most used operating system in the world is going to have a suck factor equal to Vista.

All of this suspense almost makes me install one of the thousands of linux flavors to begin hand editing samba config files throu vi in hopes that I can get to my networked files.

Nah, I’m just kidding, but I am concerned.

Let’s move on though.  They have been assuring consumers that they needn’t worry about the hardware requirements for 7.  If your computer can run Vista, then you can run 7.

Umm, yeah.  About that.

Now, we’re dealing with beta software, so of course we’ll have some issues that get ironed out long before the consumer sees them.  Also keep in mind however, that we’re dealing with Microsoft, the maker of Vista.  Many foibles will be present for your enjoyment, I can promise you.

Think about it.  You know the driver issues with each new MS os release?  Remember how it got worse when MS began holding it’s source closer to it’s vest, ensuring that product vendors couldn’t build proper drivers?  Now throw this fact into the mix.  You’ll have three active operating systems to build products and drivers for.

So, not only are they asking everyone to buy a license for an OS that they’ve already targeted for obsoletion, they’ve managed to throw yet one more wrench into the works in regards to hardware and drivers.

Now, I know you heard Ballmer say that Vista was the pinnacle of security and performance.  If you’re wondering why you would need to replace said pinnacle, then you’re not playing the game the way they intended you to.

4 hail marys and 3 license purchases should just about cover it, I think.

This is of course, in spite of the fact that XP is no longer officially sold. Need a copy of XP? Head on over to NewEgg, where a loophole gets exploited to sell legitimate OEM copies of XP Pro.

Oh and that whole deal where Ballmer insisted that Vista was the most secure OS ever?  Yeah, he was just kidding.