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For all of the negative press it received, I’m happy with my Vista Home Premium 32 bit.

I have Vista 64 Business. I don't understand the negative press either except perhaps to confirm that the typical journalist is a mental midget. The major, but fixable problem with Vista is that many of the annoying, useless, and resourse draining bells and whistles are turned on by default, even thought they add nothing to the average user experience and if anything, they are a confusing distraction and a drag on the operating system. I searched the net for "Vista tweaks" and in about two hours I was able to reconfigure the the default settings so that annoying and useless bells and whistles are turned off by default or never load in the first place. The result is a fast and stable operating system that rivals my experiences with Windows 7. Indeed, in many respects Windows 7 is Vista with the annoying and resourse hogging bells and whistles turned off by default.

You are correct about the annoying bells and whistles. Look at this from the viewpoint of a small business (the market segment for which our company provides IT services). The average employee is not capable of making these changes nor would the average employer see that as a good use of time. So they pay their IT staff to do the configuration. Now they have not only paid for an operating system, but have paid again to have it configured so it is usable -— insult to injury for sure.

Also at the time Vista came out the majority of applications common to small businesses were not yet ready for 64 bit OS. People were content with Windows XP and if there software vendors were not driving the upgrade in didn't happen. By the time Windows 7 came out, vendors were more often than not ready for 64 bit operating systems.

Truth - I still have many customers who are running business critical applications in XP mode on Windows 7 and the majority of the new machines are requested with 32 bit OS because of driver issues with legacy devices.