I know that Robert Peston from BBC News has written you an open letter, so I thought I'd taken the opportunity to write one to you, too.

I’ve been using Windows Vista since RC1, but have been reading much about it, not only from people like Paul Thurrott, but plenty of others. I’ve also been using Windows since version 1 (which I didn’t like much at the time, DOS was much more useful, especially when paired with Quarterdeck’s 386 sort-of multitasking program of the day).

Heck, I learnt DOS because I knew CP/M, and not only played with and owned Apple ][ computers, (with an Exidy Sorcerer my first), but also an XT clone, Amigas, various PC clones over the years, a Microbee and a range of others – all thanks to my father, who had the foresight to buy me a computer (the Exidy) when I was four years old in 1979 (although I wasn’t 5 yet – I was born in 1974, not long before Micro-soft came into existence).

Vista really is the nicest and best version of Windows ever. Sure, there are some strange inconsistencies here and there, as people like Paul Thurrott and others have pointed out. There’s even the strangeness of the Add Fonts control panel applet – it hasn’t been changed in years. With every new version of Windows I’ve hope to see it updated with the latest dialog box conventions of the day – but from memory it’s the same one from Windows 3.0!

Inbuilt search is nice. It’s not always as instant as Google Desktop was when I used to use it on my XP system. But it’s built-in, and it works, and I use it several times a day. Aero is sweet, I love showing it off to people, and people are always ‘wowed’, as the slogan goes.

There’s all kinds of little things to like in Vista. A previous article that I wrote recently talked about how the killer feature of Vista… is Vista! It’s everything together. Voice recognition that works, and is so good it can reportedly be used by ‘hackers’ to perform actions on your computer. If voice recognition can be used for that, it certainly has come a long way.

There are improvements in Explorer and IE7 that were at first a little jarring, but are now second nature – it has been several months since RC1 after all. I know there was a Beta 2, and I was tempted to install it – but it was just too unstable. RC1 changed all of that, and it, along with Office 2007 B2TR technical refresh, and I was hooked. XP was on a partition, but very, very rarely used thereafter.

Yes, there were bugs in RC1, but they were livable, especially with RTM soon to come, which it did on November 30, 2006. Since then, Vista has been my only operating system. There’s lots to like, and once people see it and try it for themselves on a computer that’s able to handle it, they’ll very likely want it.

But therein lies the rub. After 5 long years of development, punctuated by Tablet PC, Media Center, XP x64, 2003 and XP SP2 editions, and a Vista restart from 2003 code, Vista is going through exactly the same hoo-hah that we went through when updating to 95, 98 and ME to a lesser degree, 2000 and XP, not to mention XP x64, a version I never needed.

The hoo-hah I’m talking about? Drivers. Drivers for simple things, like my soundcard. Or my inbuilt Bluetooth. Or my HSDPA broadband USB modem (which has an awkward fix available, with the true driver yet to appear). Or the biometric fingerprint reader – a very handy security tool. Or what about the non-existent automatic rotation on my Tablet PC screen? Don’t get me wrong – I loooove the new Tablet capabilities of Vista. They’re worth the price of admission alone, and it’s brilliant that anyone with a Vista desktop or notebook can add a Wacom Graphics Tablet and get access to virtually all of the same features.

Please read on to page 2 for more...