Aero
Once you fought that battle though and upgraded/replaced everything, You'll discover that Vista is stable, fast and a nice place to work. I'm infering here that your system can run the AERO interface and that you at least bought Home Premium. If your machine doesn't run Aero or you saved money by buying Home Basic then you've totally missed the boat.
Applications
On the Applications side, Minesweeper looks better, making DVDs from photos or movie footage is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, To watch DVDs, you don't need third-party software anymore and of course Outlook Express has finally been killed-off.
IE7 is a total dog though in my view. You'll be wanting to Install Firefox as soon as you can.
If you are one of those people that often deletes or overwrites files by accident, ShadowCopy will make it easy to quickly recover older file versions.
User Access Control (UAC) is annoying if you tinker with things like me but is great for the demi-novice as it causes a "stop and think" approach to making system changes.
Direct X 10 is interesting in concept but currently just DirectX9-with-bits-you-can't-really-use as the cost of a grpahics card to run it puts it out of the reach of everyone except cash-rich bachelors with little else to spend their money on.
Vista had trouble running some games because of driver support still being flaky. That will improve over time but is annoying. nVidia have finally release decent drivers so for the most part this should no longer be an issue so long as you run the latest ones. Presumably ATi/AMD is in the same boat – especially no what the new breed of DirectX 10 cards and their drivers have been launched.
Conclusion
If your new PC comes with Vista, make sure it is Home Premium.
If you are upgrading your home PC, get hold of the Vista Upgrade Advisor and see what in your computer needs replacing. If you have less than 1GB of memory, buy some more RAM whatever you do. If you want to make Vista run really well, don't rely on Microsoft, ask nVidia instead.
If your PC runs fine, you don't want to risk breaking anything or it is critical to your business, wait a while. It'll keep.
Microsoft will withdraw Windows XP in January 2008 . That means you can still run it but support will decline for it after that point. Maybe a new PC pre-loaded with Vista will be a good Christmas present to yourself this year.
