Love it or hate it, Microsoft Windows is the world's most dominant operating system.

Not only did Windows Vista - billed by Microsoft as its biggest operating system for 10 years - fail to distinguish Microsoft's latest fiscal year from previous, non-Windows-Vista years, but Microsoft also missed its own expectations by several million dollars.

Last year, curious over the hype that was flooding the internet in the wake of the release of Windows Vista, I decided to turn masochist and inflict a 14-day Vista trial on myself. I found the operating system much worse than even its worst critic.

The Japanese are hyping Vista SP1's impending release, but a roll of toilet paper printed with highlighted features is kind of uncalled for. You kind of have to feel a little bad for Vista -- it just keeps getting crapped on these days.

Mac OSX Leopard 10.5.2 and Windows Vista Service Pack One were both released in February of 2008. Linux Ubuntu released the latest version of its operating system, nicknamed Hardy Heron, in April. I tried out each of these three operating systems to see how they compared.

As a devoted free software user, I'm almost as likely to stick my hand down a running garbarator as buy a copy of Windows 7. In fact, so far, I haven't tried Windows 7. But if its features list is any indication, I'm missing little that I don't already have with the latest version of the KDE desktop.

In the tech world this phenomenon is known as “software bloat” or “feature bloat.” It's a well-documented problem and a frequent complaint about Windows OSs—Vista in particular. In addition to being buggy, the extra features tend to bog down your system by demanding more processing power and memory. Computer-makers: Don't load up operating systems with features and then make us sweat to figure out how to get rid of the fat.

Is Windows Vista the biggest PR failure in Microsoft's history?

"Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think it's alive, but close up it's the walking dead..."