Sadnasser: Speaking of bloatware. Ever buy a laptop from HP? Hp stands for "Heaping Pile". Or so it seems. I ended up buying a clean version of XP because of the problems. It wasn't just Vista. It was the crap it came with (MY HP games, Norton, etc.). I couldn't get it all cleaned out and running well enouph.
Xp Rocks. Now my laptop runs WOW as good as my Vista Desktop.
(When I tried uninstalling Norton from my laptop I couldn't run videos from the Net any more.)
I can attest to this. My HP laptop was filled with their garbage and it made Vista completely unstable. Even removing the crap didn't help that much (I wanted to avoid a format for various reasons). In the end I eventually had to reformat. After installing Vista without the HP crap everything ran just fine. Now if only I could remove this piece of shit Intel video chipset...
Vista, while having its own issues, is not the whole problem. The manufacturers did their fair share of damage to the image of the operating system with their shitty software. I've seen many a broken install of Windows 2000 and XP because of the same crap.