Sticking with Vista

Chris Pirillo is breaking up with Vista due to a number of problems it’s given him. Scott Finnie is going with a Mac after a three month trial. I’ve upgrade two of our three home computers to Windows Vista and although things didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped, I still feel it’s a worthwhile upgrade if your hardware is up to par.

I wrote up a review a few months ago about my experience with Vista and it holds true as I read through it today. I’ve spent enough time with it now that I know my way around the product and can get to any setting I need. I can’t say enough about the integrated search feature. I can’t imagine going back to XP because of this single feature in Vista. It just flat out works! It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know Apple had this feature a lot earlier or I would have strongly considered switching. But I’ve now made a considerable investment in PC gear that switching to Apple probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Given the fact that I’m quite happy with Vista, I see no reason to at the moment.

I haven’t experienced the same level of frustration with incompatible software/drivers that Chris has. Nvidia drivers for my 6000GT card have worked great as have drivers from Creative for my X-Fi sound card. No problems with my three printers (Canon i950, HP 4L, HP 4215). I just haven’t seen many driver issues that couldn’t be fixed by downloading the latest driver from the hardware manufacturer’s website. Logitech hasn’t upgraded their drivers for my Bluetooth MX900 mouse but it works with the standard Vista drivers. I’ve had no problems with cameras, flash cards, or iPods.

I really like a number of small feature enhancements they made to Vista. Rotating pictures feels much faster on Vista. On XP it would pause before doing anything. They have done a great job with Windows Photo Gallery. Sometimes all I need to do is crop a picture and I can do that quickly in Vista without having to launch Photoshop or Picassa. I also enjoy the Sidebar which allows quick access to weather, stocks, a notes area, and network activity through the use of widgets.

Although not drastically different from XP, the small touches to the user interface are welcome. Vista just feels like a more mature product than XP in every way. They have paid a lot of attention to the overall experience. I don’t know if Microsoft Vista has reached Mac levels, but it just “feels” right.

Given the amount of time I spend on my computer, spending $250 for Vista Ultimate doesn’t seem outrageous as it has for some people. I’ll probably use it for at least 5 years which comes to $50/year or less than five bucks a month. The cost to upgrade would be less if you chose the Home Premium version.

Maybe I’m not quite as excited as I was when I upgrade from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 or even from Windows 98 to Windows XP, but I think much of that has to do with the fact that Windows XP has been quite stable for me. I’m no longer dying to upgrade to gain stability so many of the features take a little longer to appreciate. That’s not such a bad thing though.

I think that almost anyone whose machine can pass the Vista Upgrade Advisor would be happy with an upgrade to Vista. I don’t feel that Microsoft’s “Wow” ad campaign is an accurate description of what most users will experience. I’ve found myself uttering few, if any “Wow!” but many “hey, that’s nice”. People want that killer feature to justify an upgrade, and I’m not sure they will find it in Vista. You will find a solid, polished, feature-rich operating system. Whether that’s enough justification to drop a few hundred bucks on an upgrade is up to you to decide.