My Take on Windows Vista
Ok so I have to tell you that I am a little frustrated with everyone knocking on Vista. All these compatibility issues are the same problems that are encountered whenever Microsoft has updated or released a new Operating System. It happened when we went from Win 98 to 2000 a little bit from 2000 to XP and it is happening again. I really don’t think a lot of people have even tried Vista and they are just echoing everything that they are hearing from everyone else.
I run Vista Ultimate on my HP Pavilion dv5000. It did not come with vista, it came with XP and I upgraded to Vista Ultimate a mere week after Microsoft released Vista. At first I installed the 64 bit version, since my laptop is 64 bit, and I was met with many driver issues. Now I wasn’t planning on leaving the 64 bit version on there, I just wanted to see if there was any noticeable difference. I will note that there is no reason to run 64 bit version of an operating system unless you have more than 4 giga-bytes of RAM. The 32 bit version will not recognize more than 4 gigs of RAM. My laptop has one gig and at times it does choke, but that is when I am running many programs at once.
Now I was so happy with the way Vista ran on my laptop that i decided to try to install on my desktop. Now it is very important that before you do any upgrade to your OS that you should backup your important files, which I what I did first. Next I visited the Microsoft Vista page and download and ran the Vista upgrade adviser. It advised me that there would be no compatibility issues with my desktop, which is a computer I built myself. So I continued onward and installed Windows Vista. Luckily I did have a second hard drive installed on my desktop so I decided it might be better to install it on the second drive, instead of writing over my primary partition and loosing all my data. This proved to be the right move because I had a lot of issues despite the claims of the upgrade adviser.
Bottom line if you are buying a new computer get Vista, unless you depend on older legacy applications. If that is the case, or you are a small business owner, I do highly recommend that you stick with Windows XP. Unfortunately after Microsoft releases SP 3 for XP they will no longer continue to support Windows XP, at least thats what they are saying right now. Also give Vista a try before you start knocking it!
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