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About nine months ago, I had the eerie experience of having Microsoft representatives show up at my house in a limo to deliver Vista.
I happened to be writing the cover story on the then-upcoming OS for a major computer magazine, and apparently the company felt there was enough riding on this review to send a product manager, a PR person (who typed everything we said) and a loaded, massive HP laptop with Vista to my front door. This was a Men in Black sort of moment. I expected to see black ops helicopters whirling above my townhouse and Ninjas repelling down ropes. My cat is still a bit traumatized by it all and occasionally asks about these strange people.
While I actually liked Vista, and still do, Microsoft clearly had something to worry about. It does still have compatibility issues with some programs. I continue to have problems with new software installing to the hard drive but not showing up properly in the All Programs menu. There is a palpable performance hit as well. I still find the networking functions unpredictable. And the security measures that Apple mocks in some of its ads are indeed tiresome.
All that said, I am glad I decided to upgrade my main work PC to Vista a couple of months ago, and many of the reasons relate directly to both productivity and fun. The universal search function in Vista is a real revelation when it comes to work. A single search box on the Start menu gets me directly to programs, email, docs and even images. The indexing that goes on in background is not intrusive. There is a DVD editor built right into the operating system, and it is not half bad. The tagging and previewing functions in the photo library really are better tuned to digital photographers. In terms of overall workflow across media types, Vista is just more efficient.
Generally, Vista recognizes that we use our PCs for a wider range of multimedia storage and playback now, and it reacts accordingly. And for home theater media streamers a Vista PC is just that much easier for playback devices like the Xbox360, Media Center PCs and even PS3s to find. When my Xbox is on, the two Vista PCs in the home office immediately detect its presence and offer to use it as a playback device.
So, let the persistent Vista bashing continue. I for one would recommend that people with the hardware power and memory capacity to run it well opt for the upgrade.
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