Anecdotal evidence.

Windows Vista doesn't seem to be getting an awful lot of good press — various firms, such as Lenovo, offering free upgrades from Vista to XP is hardly the best PR. My own experience of Vista is that... well, I'd take the free upgrade.

My best friend Alun has a Vista laptop. A few months ago, its DVD drive stopped working when he plugged his Sony phone into it. I had to repair it by editing the registry. To be fair, this is really Sony's fault — and they've got form, of course — but Microsoft's latest flagship operating system shouldn't be quite that unstable.

More recently, Alun, quite out of the blue, got some on-screen message saying that Vista was repairing vital files and that his personal files and settings would be unaffected. And then the laptop reverted to factory settings. He's lost a lot of stuff, including family photos.

Now, yeah, he should have backed up. But the fact that not backing up was his mistake doesn't change the fact that his need to back up was created by Microsoft's shoddy yet expensive operating system.