I seem to cycle on how I feel about Vista. I originally put it on my 3 year old laptop with 1.5.Gb of ram. I found it interesting but very slow. I reverted to XP and was fine. I then had a need for new hardware, and I went high end and Vista. I thought Vista was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Then the issue of application compatibility hit me (mostly industry specific business stuff) and it again fell out of favor.
To the point many make about Vista: performance. Info World ran a great
article last spring. The heart of it was “Windows Vista is a bloated pig of an operating system. In fact, compared to Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or 3, Vista requires roughly twice the hardware resources to deliver comparable performance. Even stripped to the bone, with every new UI enhancement turned off and every new background service disabled, Vista is a good 40 percent slower than XP at a variety of business productivity tasks.”
This pretty much defines a road map for home users and Vista. Unless you are upgrading to serious new hardware, don’t expect to see any performance improvement. Conversely, if you do upgrade old hardware, be ready for a performance hit, even with more RAM.
Most of the other issues with Vista are being resolved via SP1, hot fixes and more 3rd party participation. Too bad, because with Windows 7 now on the horizon, Vista could become, in fact, the new Win ’98 ME.