"Vista removal" quickly became one of my most frequently asked services as soon as PC manufacturers started to force-sell Vista with their products. Let's take a look at the current situation:

Windows XP is not sold anymore, except as OEM.
Customers don't want Vista.
My friends don't want Vista.
IT professionals don't want Vista.
Nobody wants Vista.

Yet, Vista is the only operating system offered with new PC laptops and desktops. One might think downgrading (or actually upgrading, since you're changing for the better) to XP was an easy and painless operation. That would be wrong.

While it is an easy operation for some computers, many of the laptops sold these days are very difficult, if even impossible to get working with XP. The installer might BSOD before you even get the chance to partition your drives, or your laptop might have one of the many chipsets that simply have no drivers for XP at all.

That is not to forget how hard it can be to obtain a license for XP in the first place. If your Vista is the Ultimate or Business version, you're lucky. If not: happy hunting.

One example of Vista-only hardware is the Conexant HD SmartAudio 221. I now finally have sound working on the laptops that contain this chipset. After 5 days of looking for a working driver, I managed to get an older driver version working by manually modifying its INF file (download my modified Windows XP 32-bit driver for Conexant HD SmartAudio 221 here). Before this I had spent several days searching for the other drivers for XP on HP dv9740eo and other models from HP, Compaq and Fujitsu-Siemens.

What makes searching for the drivers even more interesting, is that some manufacturers don't care to mark their Vista-only drivers as such. You have to go on trying the drivers (yes, they often install fine under XP) just to find out the device cannot work with it, because it's not meant for XP.

Alternatives?
Things have been a lot easier with Ubuntu Linux. So far it has installed on every single PC (laptop or desktop) painlessly, recognizing every piece of hardware out-of-the-box, including WLAN, fingerprint readers and sound. Thus, the best solution has been to install a dual-boot or virtualization (Windows under Linux).

XP for those Windows-only programs, which still haven't been made platform-independent or ported to Linux. And Linux for the rest: if you need sound for a YouTube video, for example, boot to Linux.

Comments on Ubuntu have been really positive: new users have been praising its simplicity and ease-of-use. One user came to tell me how easy the printer installation was under Ubuntu compared to XP, another one was praising the USB memory support and several others have been extremely happy to get rid of all the virus problems, at last. While Ubuntu and GNOME sometimes get critic from the more advanced users, it seems Canonical really has succeeded in building a "Linux for human beings".

So booting between 2 operating systems is sometimes needed to avoid Vista. But people seem more than willing to do this. Here are just some of the comments I hear every day. They're full of hatred against Vista:

"I can't find anything in this mess!"
"Why is my new PC so slow opening a browser takes 10 minutes?"
"It started installing something and the battery went dead. Now Vista won't start."
"I hate these stupid questions (UAC) every time I want to start something!"
"The shutdown button never does what I want!"
"It is even worse than Office 2007!"

Bottom line
Microsoft has left their customers in a difficult situation: their latest offering is crap, but the previous product is not sold anymore. They need to start selling XP again. Hardware manufacturers need to start supporting XP again. If customers are willing to pay extra just to get rid of Vista, it is clear Vista has failed.

Vista is an utter, complete and total disaster. A flop that should've never been released.