Vista: Five-Month Impression

OK, it's been five months since I first started using Windows Vista. I started off using Vista Ultimate, but frankly I did not find the additional features of Ultimate to be compelling. I tried using Media Center a couple of times and never used BitLocker. As I said previously, there's no compelling reason to upgrade from XP.

If you do upgrade, however, make sure that Vista has been available on similar hardware for a few months. My Toshiba laptop required a BIOS update to make all the hardware appear correctly in Vista, and drivers were not completely available until May. I would check for both drivers, firmware, and BIOS updates for your platform before upgrading.

Speaking of upgrading... my opinion on Vista editions is as follows:

• Vista Home Basic: Why bother? It's just Windows XP with annoying UAC prompts.
• Vista Home Premium: get a decent graphics controller
• Vista Business: if you don't need Media Center, this is a better choice because of the advanced backup feature of disk imaging
• Vista Ultimate: You better have top-of-the-line hardware and actually want to use Media Center, otherwise just use Vista Business
• All Editions: get 2GB memory (1GB is bare minimum)

If you just want the graphical improvements, check out this article and this utility.