Don’t just kill me for saying this but but I seriously don’t hate Vista and I have been using Vista for quite some time from the beta RC builds to the current Home Premium version which is on my primary computer, I also have patched Vista with SP1 RC that was released last week and it did seems to iron out a few bugs it had earlier, so I would recommend you wait for SP1 to release officially if you are planning to upgrade to Vista.
It’s not that I like everything about Vista, Microsoft did a lot of stupid things that still annoys me, like having a Zillion flavors of the OS, why didn’t they just have two versions like they did for XP, or even better just have one like Mac OS, but I guess their Marketing dept things otherwise…… and the insane pricing of Vista Ultimate, I feel having so many versions just confuses the end user and lets not even talk about the Vista Home Basic version, why the hell do you even have that!




The most stupid thing according to me that Microsoft did with Vista is to let PC / Laptop Manufactures ship Vista machines with 512MB Ram, even now I see ads of great laptops and desktop computers with good dual core processors with 512 MB Ram being shipped with Vista, which according to me is the reason why people hate vista, to Vista to run satisfactory you need at least a 1 GIG of RAM, anything lesser than that and you would be just sitting there and staring at the screen, even clicking on the start menu to access the program folders would be a pain, I feel Vista requires 4 times the RAM XP did to make it run properly upto the 1 GB mark, don’t just start wining about the RAM issue right now let me explain.
If you had a computer with XP with just 128 MB Ram you would know how frustrating it is to operate it just booting it and arriving at the desktop screen will make you mad likewise vista with 512 MB is like that, I feel the bare minimum for working with XP is 256 MB ram, and for Vista that figure is 1 GB RAM (4 times the RAM) XP with 512 runs great and likewise vista with 2 GB RAM is great to work with, now you must be thing I must be mad to recommend an OS that requires 4 times RAM than XP, yeah the cost of RAM if you see is so low these days, for less than the price of 256MB about 4 years ago you can get a Gig or more of RAM, as of writing this story the cost of 1 GB DDR2 RAM is around Rs 1,200.
Second thing important after the RAM is the kind of processor you use, I seriously don’t recommend vista if you computer is more than 2 years old or to simplify things its should be at least a dual core machine (I earlier had a AMD XP 3500+ machine with 1 GB Ram that runs Vista fine I used it a lot with the Beta RC builds but with a dual core it was much better) dual core or quad core is the way to go, My current machine on which I work is a Intel Quad Core, with 2 GB Ram and it runs Vista like a dream, on a side note currently a dual core is more than enough coz we don’t have many Quad core applications yet.
What do I like in Vista?
The number one reason I would recommend novice users to Vista is the better Security model that is built right into the OS, from the Protected mode in which Internet Explorer works, to the built in Defender, UAC and the firewall which all makes Vista more secure than XP out of the box also things like the integrated search which make searching documents / files / emails a snap to the much more elegant desktop with the Aero, the sidebar with Gadgets, Improved movie maker, photo gallery and built in support for DVD writing also worth mentioning is the improved Media Center experience and a lot of improvements under the hood likesuperfetch and readyboost and DirectX 10.

Reasons why you should not upgrade to Vista yet!#
If you have some old hardware like printers and scanners, make sure your vendor has drivers for Vista if not they will not work with Vista, I had to remove one of TV tuner that used to work perfectly in XP that simply did not work in Vista, luckily my Printers, scanners etc had drivers for Vista and they work prefectly fine, but If you have some old legacy software it might not work with Vista, you might be forced to upgrade to a new Vista friendly version (you can make 95% of your old software applications work with Vista using the compatibility mode so make sure you check that option before purchasing a new vista version) .# If you are happy with your XP based computer you don’t need to upgrade to Vista, you can get almost all the features that you have on Vista via Free addon softwares, example the search and gadgets can be accomplished via Google desktop Search you can also download Windows Defender and IE 7 for FREE from Microsoft, use a browser like firefox and just slap up a free firewall and a Antivirus and keep automatic updates on and your XP computer should be pretty secure.# If you don’t have enough RAM or a fast processor there is no point in even thinking about Vista, (see my RAM rant above) for Vista you would need better hardware to get the same performance that you did with XP.# There are still some stability issues, a lot of improvement has been seen in the SP1 RC, but its better to wait till the official release of SP1. If you are planning to upgrading your computer from XP to Vista I suggest you download the Vista Upgrade Advisor and run it on your XP machine to make sure your hardware and software are compatible with Vista. If you want to know what changes and new additions Microsoft have done deep into Vista, read this article by Computer World – A hard look at Vista.