I installed the 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate shortly after it RTM'd back in November 2006. Everything was going perfectly fine with it until a couple weeks ago. It started Blue Screening (BSOD) and giving me some other strange issues.

Here's a list of some of the issues I've been having:

• Blue Screens (BSOD) - It shows a different error message each time, so there isn't just one thing wrong.
• CD/DVD Burner says it can't be accessed, but then I try again a second later and it works fine.
• Printer just stopped working; I can't figute out why.

Before all this started happening, I was very Pro Vista. But, now my opinion is that it probably isn't any more reliable than XP, possibly even less. I'm pretty dissapointed, since I used to reinstall XP pretty traditionally once every year, and I was hoping that Vista would be different. But I guess not...

Now, I have been downloading the latest updates as they come out. Could this be what my problem is? Are the latest updates to Vista, or maybe even just one of them causing my problems? However, it could always be something I installed, like some crappy program or faulty driver. I'm not sure I'll really ever find out, but I hope that in a year from now I wont have to reinstall again.

You may be wondering what preventative measures I will be taking this next time around. Well, I'm actually going to only install the bare minimum applications on the machine and then use Virtual PC instances to run everything else. This way, if something screws up Windows again, hopefully it happens within the VPC instance, and I wont have to go through this pain of reinstalling everything again.