You probably already hate me for defending Microsoft’s much-maligned operating system.

Now, I admit, my version of Vista is pretty tweaked and pimped out. The user-account control that pops up, jack-in-the-box-style, when you want to install any new program? Gone. Vista's search feature? Gone. Thanks. I know where I keep my files. I'd rather not have the hard drive whirring away all the time. Then there are the specialized tweaks that you can make with free programs to run Vista faster and to optimize it for your computer if you have a ton of memory (which I do). And ... well, there's also RocketDock, which puts a Mac-like (OK, Mac-cloned) dock at the bottom of my screen.

So, clearly, Vista can stand some improvements, and one more thing I like about it is that it's easy to make them. But even straight out of the box—the awful "user account control" excepted (and we'll get to that in a second)—Vista is much, much better than Microsoft's previous operating system, Windows XP.

What happened to give so many people the idea that Microsoft had taken a step backward? A few things. The first has been the influence of the antivirus/security-industrial complex. Microsoft's awkward, pervasively annoying user-account control led users to think they were always under attack from an army of pimple-faced Eastern European kids looking to steal their credit card numbers and turn their computers into self-reproducing zombie killers. Then the folks who earn a living making you worry about security swooped in with lists of Vista's supposed vulnerabilities.

In fact, some of those folks have been responsible for the very issues that make people hate Windows. The first thing I did when I got my computer was get rid of the three-month free trial of Symantec's Norton protection software. You think that what's wrong with your computer is Microsoft? Try getting rid of Norton—it would be a hairy and hardy virus indeed that manages to slow down and cripple your computer as thoroughly as the programs that are supposed to protect it. Maybe it's improved in the latest version—but I'm not about to try again.

I've been running Vista without any antivirus protection (though, I almost never use Internet Explorer, sticking with Firefox and Google's Chrome browser), have visited plenty of less-than-kosher sites—free Eastern European game downloads, anyone?—and have done just fine. But I'm in the brave minority. And this is largely Microsoft's own fault. The company should have made Vista's security features invisible. Instead, it made them the focus of its Vista campaign. If you want folks to believe your house is safe, covering the entire front door with big padlocks isn't the way to do it.

In its furious efforts to sell buyers on security—the thing that they least want to think about and that should be as invisible as possible—Microsoft failed to make any compelling case for what Vista does have going for it. One thing that's telling about Apple's advertising campaign is how traditional it is its core. The old "Think Different" ads have—even now, years after they've been retired—left people with the general sense that the Mac is a lifestyle or status brand, promising people that, by buying a Mac, they'd become part of a cultural elite.