You probably already hate me for defending Microsoft’s much-maligned operating system.

It's rare that I sit down to write an article, see a blank page open up on the screen, and immediately start visualizing the hate mail that's going to arrive.

But, then, I don't write a defense of Microsoft every day. I pity the public-relations folks who have to. It's like pulling out your Hamas membership card at a Department of Homeland Security cocktail mixer. Or like dressing up as a giant condom at a Silver Ring Thing rally. This is just not what people want to read.

Microsoft's Vista has met with such relentless negativism that you assume Microsoft has folded its hand and is desperately trying to scrub any mention of the dreaded Vista, or anything that might remind people of Vista, from the next release of Windows, hoping that the completely generic Windows 7 will make people forget what came before. Vista has been such a spectacular failure that Apple has managed to build a whole blockbuster ad campaign on making fun of it. There've been competitive comparison ads before: the Pepsi Challenge, Avis' "We Try Harder." But it's a long, long way from "We Try Harder" to the message of the Apple ads, which can be summarized as "Windows sucks." Vista has gotten such a bad rap that Microsoft's own ad agency can't get its employees to use it on their computers.

I'm not going to go into whether Vista is better than the Mac. The last debate of that sort I got into was about whether the really badass G.I. Joe dude with the flamethrower would whip the even more badass-looking one with the big machine gun, and that was in fifth grade. I have no issue with Steve Jobs' fine machines. They work very well. They look great. My issue is not with the Mac operating system. It's with the idea that somehow Microsoft's programmers flubbed Vista so badly that they came up with a kludgy, crash-prone operating system worse than what they had before.

They didn't. I've been using Vista for the last year and a half, and it doesn't crash. OK, very occasionally it does. Maybe a handful of times—and that's on a computer that's essentially always on, except when it puts itself into "hibernation mode" at night. The few times it has, I've looked at the screen, found the "start Windows normally" option, and pressed "enter." It has started fine.

The power issues that afflicted my old Windows XP laptop, which would quietly drain the battery when it was supposed to be in standby mode and would refuse to wake up when I tried to turn it back on, are gone. Also gone are the mysterious fits of network dyspepsia that made the old machine suddenly refuse to connect to this or that network. My Vista machine does not pick and choose, as older XP machines seemed to, between the camera memory cards it likes and the ones that for some unknown reason it refuses to talk to. I like that Vista seems to have learned what I use most often and opens those programs just about instantaneously.