One area in which MS was lackluster upon drivers was some of their own products - for example the force feedback joysticks, still on sale at the time, never got

One area in which MS was lackluster upon drivers was some of their own products - for example the force feedback joysticks, still on sale at the time, never got a Vista driver out of MS and became a glorious paper weight overnight. That and apart from an initial few months of unstable GFX drivers, was utterly solid. On a side-note, I believe Core Duo2's was the last Intel chips to not include any form of inbuilt `management` silicon and as such,still favoured by some paranoid/security prudent types.