You do realize that many thousands of corporations run their server infastructure on windows boxes. Things like web servers, mail servers, application servers, db servers, file servers and a host of other things on Windows server products? Many find windows server prodcuts to be quite solid and reliable and go months and months without reboots and the only time might be for scheduled reboots due to security updates and such (not because of actual problems). These servers do multitask you know. Also the next server product (longhorn) will be based heavily on Vista's core.
I'm not familiar with servers and such but this
"article" is what I found against your statement that Windows server products can go months and months (how many?) without a reboot...
Lastly, if a school cannot spend the $15 a year on a volume license (per workstation) when they saved a whole bunch of $$ on the actual computer purchase, then I dont know what to say. Think about it. Companies with thousands of employee run Windows boxes and I'm sure some of those employee might surf to weird places too. If you got AV on the box for such a low price and are protected, then whats the issue.
A company can purchase for $600 a half decent dual core computer and a LCD monitor. Lets assume they just saved $300 on the hardware, how many years of AV will that buy for that computer? At $15-$20 a year, thats like 15 years.
Actually I don't think a good virus software/suite actually cost 15$ per computer (again I'm not sure if buying in bulks gives you discounts, it probably depends on the company). But I have found that most Anti virus (Norton, Kaspersky, Macafee) costs around 60$. And so 60$ * (amount of total computers) = the total cost.
I hope you know that bloatware slows down a machine not because it makes registry entries but because they are actual applications that are physically starting up and running.
If I put 15 items in your OSX startup and then left the applications activily running in the background, then it would slow down too.
Microsoft down not provide the 'bloatware'. Manufacturers install it on their computers. Has nothing to do with microsoft. Should be up to the end user to decide if they want to remove that crap or not.
Imagine you went to a car dealership and to sweeten the pot, they filled the trunk with free sample size packages of stuff and you drove it home. Would you leave all that crap in the trunk and complain that driving is too slow? No you wouldnt. You'd leave a few goodies and candies in your glovebox and take the other useless crap they threw into your new car and remove it.
Again you are right since this is mainly "Why people hate 'Windows Vista'" and not really a Windows vs Mac...
However one of the problem with Windows is that they licenses their OS to other OEMs and I don't think MS has any control in what those OEM put on their system (except threatening to remove their lisence to distribute Windows) so in the end, usually, the OEMs would put bunch of junk on your computer. If MS and only MS sold computers that had their OS on it then maybe it wouldn't be full of bloatware and programs we don't need.
Oh and when you uninstall programs it leaves a lot of crap in the registry, so it's like them stuffing food into your trunk and you having to clean that out afterwards because the car has so many cracks where the crumbs get stuck... lol.
But just you let people know that most Mac users have actually used Windows and switched to Mac, most of them know from experience and have reasons why they don't like Vista, it's not like you're trying to get people to switch back to WinPC?.. Right?