No OS can claim perfect networking, but experience again wins out. Windows XP spent the past six years getting network¬ing among XP systems just right (even if it had to kludge wireless networking sup¬port as Wi-Fi grew in popularity). The use of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) in particular brings a no-fuss, no-muss approach to getting products to see one another.

Then along came Vista. Microsoft completely rewrote the networking stack, and Oliver Rist believes that, in so doing, Microsoft improved wireless but screwed up once-reliable wired net¬working. More than one person here has seen previously rock-solid Ethernet connections with XP drop repeatedly with Vista. But early reports on Vista Service Pack I, which should be out by the time you read this story, claim that SPI fixes these issues and even improves network speed threefold. (See go.pcmag .com/vistaspl for a review of SPI, and page 114 in this issue for a security angle.)

Wireless networking has been a bright spot for Vista from day one. Mac OS Leopard took some serious drubbing (including from PC Magazine) for break¬ing networking that was easy to use and seemed to work without a hitch in Tiger. An update to 10.5.1, however, alleviates the problems. Mac OS also supports UPnP, and Mac and Windows systems talking to each other hasn't been a prob¬lem for a while-though it's hardly as simple as it should be.

Ubuntu's lack of open-source drivers for various networking hardware weighs against it here. Installing a Linux distro and expecting your Wi-Fi card to work is a big gamble, though when it works, it works very well: You won't have trouble getting online. Finding shared resources on the network, such as printers or file shares, can also work, but finding and using are two different things. It's prob¬ably not a big problem for a true tech nerd, but who has the time to waste? Oliver says, "This is one of those areas where Linux suffers from the designed¬by-nerds-for-nerds syndrome. They simply assume too much knowledge on the part of the end user."