Another Vista laptop bites the dust

My brother the other day called me up at work. He'd just bought a new laptop and it had windows vista on it. So he spent the morning trying to install things and had finally given up. He rang me to find out if he could just back up vista onto disks and then downgrade to XP, keeping Vista in case he wanted to upgrade later.

Now my brother has a degree in engineering, and an MBA. He has worked as a materials engineer for a number of years, and then as middle management. Of late he's run his own business. I consider him to be pretty well educated and techno savvy.

So why did he give up on Vista? The learning curve is too big, the hassles of things just not working on it are too big. Microsoft had a morning of his time to ease him into it and it flunked. I haven't even upgraded to Vista as I'd need a new PC at home.

I guess its getting harder and harder for Microsoft to convince people to upgrade as there seems to be very little immediately obvious reason to migrate. Maybe the memory requirements of programs will eventually break the 4GB barrier and with that 64 bit processors will take over and Vista at the same time. Personally I hope it happens. 4GB of memory seems a silly limit to me and I like some of what I've seen in vista, but saying that we have never gotten over the x86 instruction set, so maybe it will just be easier to retro fit everything to XP forever? I hope not.