The Vista reviews are in, and they're about as pretty as the BSOD

A Microsoft devotee -- in fact, a self-described "Microsoft apologist" -- couldn't wait to get her hands on Vista. She writes that over the course of her 20-year love afair with Microsoft products she "insisted that MS-DOS wasn't hard to use (once you got used to it), that Windows 3.1 was the greatest innovation in desktop operating systems, that Word was in fact superior to WordPerfect, and that Windows XP was, quite simply, 'it.'"

But, playing with the new version of Windows for more than a month "has done what years of experience and exhortations from Mac-loving friends could not: it has converted me into a Mac fan." Find out why in the article "Uninspiring Vista".

And, in the article "The Trouble with Vista" a Beta user says that 80 percent of the new features in the latest Windows incarnation are "positive," and yet "nothing about Vista is truly innovative or compelling."

He has tested successive Beta versions since late 2003 and writes: "Even after all that research on Vista, my inner [Magic] 8 Ball keeps saying, 'Reply hazy, try again.'"

On a lighter note, in honor of Vista's wide release last week, Wired.com offers up "BSOD through the ages", a pictorial history of Windows' infamous Blue Screen of Death, which in one version of Longhorn, the Vista development code name, was actually... red.