March 2008: is Vista worth it?

I use Vista on my main desktop and my laptop. I have experienced no problems beyond the minor glitch you would expect with a new OS and as each new driver and fix is released things have gotten better. For me Vista is much preferable to XP. However, I still like XP and regard it as a very safe and viable choice. It's 6 years mature and works with anything - at least for now.

I run Vista 64 on a powerful desktop with 8 gig ram. My laptop is much less powerful but has 2 gig ram at least. Both are new.

Your experience may simply depend on your hardware and your environment. If you need to get on a corporate network or run proprietary or older apps or if you need legacy hardware support, say for an old printer or scanner for example, you just MIGHT hit a wall with Vista. This can be a real problem for businesses and I think they are doing the right thing by waiting. Yet, Vista will probably work fine for them too in most cases. This 'maybe' is probably what is stopping a lot of business users from going to Vista.

The reports you hear about Vista being slow or buggy have me scratching my head. I simply have not seen it myself or heard any compelling, recent!, accounts of others experience of it. I wonder if many of these complaining users have attempted to run Vista on old PCs they tried to upgrade, or with Aero enabled on 512 RAM machines or else tried Vista shortly after it's release, or else were simply so used to XP that they rejected Vista because it is new and different. Some don't like the pop-up UAC interrupts but this division of the OS into user mode and kernel mode is something Linux and Mac have already been doing and it is MUCH more secure. The pent up MS hate is a big part of the backlash against Vista - do not doubt that for a second! A lot of the negative reports are no doubt from very vocal, tin hatted Mac and Linux users just spreading the usual FUD. They can have their %5 woldwide.

Considering the above caveats I'd get Vista if I were you but I would get at least 2 gig RAM and be sure to get a nice Intel Core 2 duo. XP is safe, Vista (or its blood brothers who will follow it) are the future.

Just don't fear Vista. That's just silly. It's doing fine now. You always hear about the problems. The happy people don't squawk so loud. It was the same when XP came out.

Thanks for the advice, I will take it into consideration. I see your points, but on the other hand my own sources are saying the opposite. The problem is that these arguments were also made about ME when it came out, and then it was trashed and a new OP (ie XP) was put out in its place. And everyone with ME was forced to buy the new OP or face massive difficulties.

All I know is that I work inside a university, and our own tech/IT people are telling me Vista is rubbish. And my colleagues have all found that it causes vital software (such as NI Labview) to crash (no, not the old versions, the 2007/08 versions). Of course, the IT community often favors Mac and Linux platforms for the reasons you state above, that they are safer and more stable. The argument does go both ways, as you could say that IT people are knowledgeable about the new Vista architecture as they are familiar with Mac/Linux - and if they claim Vista is built like rubbish than maybe it is - but at the same time they could also be biased against MS because they prefer Mac/Linux.

Again, thanks for posting, it is really helpful to get outside opinions.

Last week I worked on a friend's XP notebook. She had never downloaded and installed SP2 and had been using the laptop for many years. I had 'fixed' her laptop on occasion in the past, running a registry repair and stopping the pop up errors and such. She complained about 'online instability' and said she had to constantly 'reformat and reload the system CD.' Anyway...I loaded it up for her with SP2 and all the hundrerds and hundreds of XP patches (is it 1500-1600 by now). Put on an AV program and also upgraded her RAM form 512Mb to 1GB. Her XP notebook is fine so far. It all reminded me of when I got my first very first system with Windows XP installed. An HP notebook with XP Pro and 256MB of RAM!!!!! Gawd was that thing rubbish. Start menu took 30 seconds or more to show up on the screen after clicking on 'start' if I had a couple of explorers open. I have since added 512 MB RAM, latest BIOS, etc. and still use the notebook from time to time. Like Notherdude said, for some sectors of industry revamping their deeply entrenched XP driven software/hardware to Vista machines is not so easily done. For example, I remember when the DOT Department of Transportation announced the organization would not be updating their 500,000 computer systems to VISTA when VISTA was released.

Good point, history always repeats itself, and I'm sure one day the DOT won't go to the next OS once they trance themselves with Vista...then again some systems like were I used to work(Sales type of place like BestBuy) used a POS(point of sales) system that was older than me...

I also have a very positive experience with Vista. I have a fairly high-end PC (Intel quad-core, 8GB RAM, 8-series GPU, fast disk system), which I have built with Vista in mind, so that may have played a role. That does not mean that all this computer muscle is needed just to run Vista - I can do things on my computer that would be impossible with my previous XP machine. From my point of view and in my experience, there are two main improvements compared to the previous Windows OS:

1) Vista can use the resources much more intelligently where it matters - the new memory management system really works and various background services do not get in the way of actual applications.
2) Vista does not need the fiddling and fine-tuning that was necessary with Win Xp's - it is ready to go directly out of the box.

On my computer, Vista is very stable (not a single OS crash so far) and if I compare it to the computer that I bought for Win XP all those years ago, which cost much more money, it is much faster with current applications than XP was with the then-new applications.

Now knowing that Windows 7 will be out in late '09, 1H '10, is it worth it?

1H 2010, at the earliest.

If you already have a computer running XP, then yeah, there's no "Killer App" in Vista (unless you count free Speech Recognition) to drive you to the upgrade. But if you're building a new computer, why bother with the older OS??? Contrary to all the hyperbole, Vista *does* work.

Also, know the same argument as yours keeps repeating every time there's a new version of Windows.

I believe by then, vista 64, a much better cousin of vista 32-bit version will dominate 09-10

Vista is pretty.

For people that believe Vista does not worth it...

Now that Vista SP1 is out, will that change your mind?

I haven't had many problems with Vista so far... I'll see how SP1 goes