You might want to read this before you continue, but it’s not essential. To summarise, I switched to Vista about 16 months ago, but found it very hard work and my system generally ran very slow, and there were general driver and software incompatible issues. Last week, I decided it had been long enough, and bravely took the plunge (again) into the murky depths of Vista. I’ll try and highlight the key points between the two OS’s and anything else I found along the way.
Upgrading to Vista, (unlike downgrading to XP) was as easy as anything. Just shove in the CD, put in your code, and press next. Done.
Vista instantly looks very good without any customising or setup. This could be because XP is actually very old now, and looks dated by today’s standards. Even so, Vista looks very flash right from the go. After installing key drivers from a CD (supplied with my machine) connecting to the Internet was a breeze, and from there I downloaded all my usual applications such as Firefox, Steam, and such, without any problems.
This was the point last time where I got stuck. Gaming was slow to the point of being unplayable, Firefox worked but was slow, and many applications crashed all the time or were totally incompatible – even with the ‘XP compatibility mode’ enabled. Within a week I had had enough and went back to XP.
This time around however, it was very smooth sailing. Updates all downloaded and installed fine, it looks great and I can’t think of anything that doesn’t run as well as it did on XP. Even anti-virus software, which was a real pain initially, now runs perfectly. If you’re running Windows Aero the Explorer menu’s looks fantastic, and there are so many neat touches (transparency, windows switching, application previews etc) and considering there is no lag in performance when compared to XP, its pleasantly surprising.
So, if you are still on XP and your hardware can manage the demands of Vista, I would highly recommend you make the switch.
Yup, Vista is very mature now, especially after SP1. A big part of the problem was that companies were very slow in releasing updated drivers, and patching their programs.
Anyhow, not long now till Windows 7! :p