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There is an huge debate wether you should upgrade to Windows Vista or not, given its quite high price and changes that someone might judge as not revolutionary. The truth is most changes are under the hood and affect Windows internals. Many of them will reflect on everyday usage but according to machine and your usage, you will feel them a lot or not.

This review could be influenced by the fact I got my Vista Ultimate copy via MSDN so I didn't pay to have just Vista. However, I also recently bought a DELL Inspiron 1510 and I ordered it with Vista Basic Home preloaded so my judgement will also reflect that experience.

So that's my Vista Desktop right now (click on the picture to enlarge). It features Aero, new Microsoft interface which is quite pleasant to see and use. However, my Inspiron doesn't use Aero since Vista Basic Home cannot enable that feature.

In subpages of this section, you will find articles on specific features I like about Vista but this page will mostly display an overview of the system.

How does it feel?
You might wonder how Vista feels. Is it snappier than XP? Is it more stable? My aswer is yes. It does feel much snappier than XP, expecially when compared to an XP system which has been installed many months ago. As you might know, Windows installations tend to get slower and slower everyday you use it until a point where you should install a clean XP again and start over. That happens for various reasons, among which there surely are disk fragmentation and Windows internals (like registry becoming full of trash as part of your apps usage and so on). With Vista, Microsoft released slight changes to its NTFS file system and let the defragmenter tool have more space (for example, by default you will have defragmenter event in your task schedule to run this tool every 5 days). I have to say this was a good move and while I didn't experience the difference between a 8 months old Vista system and corresponding XP, defragmenting on a weekly basis (or more) is useful and it will require less time than defragmenting when XP is barely usable.

Anyway, even during quite complex operations, Vista feels snappier than XP, even during program installations events, when XP is barely usable while Vista is not tied to its knees. That's not true for all applications (for example, installing MSDN library gives some annoyance to Vista too) but the overall feeling is much better (suggestion: disable your antivirus software when installing safe software like MSDN, Visual Studio and so on. Installation will be much shorter and your system won't be spending its time checking thousands of safe files. But remember what I wrote: safe software like the one you can download from Microsoft, Adobe etc. Don't download a rather unknown software from the Internet and disable your A/V: that would be just a suicide).

Better performance
Feeling snappier and faster doesn't mean a software performs better and let's first say that your machine should Vista capable to enjoy that. Vista capable means having a good amount of memory (from 1GB RAM up), a good video card with at least 128MB RAM and a good HD, both in terms of size and speed.

But let's also consider a very good thing: Vista is not based on Windows XP but rather on newer Windows2003 system, probably on Windows2003 SP1 with lots of internal changes. I don't think it's a complete rewrite but almost.

It's an open secret that Windows2003 kernel and subsystems are faster than XP ones and by far. I know that by experience and that's why some gamers install a Windows2003 on their machine to play games (and tweak that installation a bit). Windows2003 is just faster than XP but a bit heavier in terms of system requirements so you need at least 1GB RAM to use Windows2003 while you can successfully use XP with only 512MB RAM. Vista is an evolution of Windows2003 so, when compared to an XP system, you could expect execution improvements for applications and, most of all, better network performance, expecially when connecting to the Internet. That's a key element to me and I can say that I found out what I expected: better performance for Internet applications, even better than Windows2003 and largely better than XP. Of course, don't expect that if your machine has only 512MB RAM...

Final words
Vista is a good upgrade, expecially if you get it preloaded on your new PC. Remember that many PC manufacturers offer upgrades to Vista Home Premium for their Vista Capable PCs. For example, I could order my Vista Home Premium version from Packard Bell and pay 99 euros for that. If your system has enough memory (1GB up), you could consider that as 99 euros are not that much.

Vista Pros:
* feels better and snappier
* Aero is beautiful (when your Vista version includes that)
* better overall performance
* largely better Internet performance, expecially when compared to XP but also when compared to Windows2003
* many system components have been re-designed or re-engineerized (for example, new Explorer is better usable)
* while you need to accustomize to new organization of the system, after a few hours that becomes very natural
* Vista offers more features, more information and even faster common operations when you know how to do that

Vista cons:
* you need a Vista capable machine (though I installed it on a Athelon XP 2500+ with 480MB RAM and it works!)
* you need to have at least 1GB to feel a good difference, better if you install 2GB RAM
* it takes some times to understand how to perform familiar operations (but it won't take weeks)