... developer / gamer

How'd the Vista upgrade go? I can describe it in one word.. smooth. I installed Vista Ultimate as an Upgrade from XP, and had no hitches. Obviously there were a few drivers that needed to be upgraded to the Vista version. For example my XFX NVidia 8800 GTX video card, and my Razer Copperhead mouse drivers. But other than that, things went eerily well. Wait.. that wasn't supposed to happen. From what I've heard around the internet, my computer is supposed to whine and complain the whole way through, spitting out blue screens of death like used tobacco.... or... was all that hubub just a smear campaign driven by hardcore OS X, and Linux fans? Nah, couldn't be. Personally, I'm a fan of all flavors of OS's and think each has their strong points. The whole fanboy attitudes some people have baffle me.

Now, in the small amount of time I've used Vista so far, I actually liked it quite a bit. Feature #1 on my list is the new search bar embedded in the start menu. Want to play Halo PC? Just type 'halo' and hit enter and you've got it. This drastically changes the way I get around in Windows. Feature #2 is the aero interface. I really like the way it looks, and it's nice to be able to use a little bit of that idle processing power from my video card for effects in the OS. Some say aero is OS X like, I say no way.

So something must have gone wrong with my install right.. well yes there were some 3rd party software compatibility issues I ran into. But nothing that breaks my experience as a whole. Those problems were in iTunes video playback. The videos were choppy and the sound did not match up. I fixed this by creating a shared folder on my other computer on the network, putting the videos in question in the folder and accessing them from my Vista machine. Soon enough iTunes will fix this glitch, but my workaround will hold me over for now. Another issue I had was with Bit Defender Virus scan, obviously a Vista version of this software is required, and they haven't released that yet. When they do, I will be right back in business.

So, should you wait to get Vista? Wait it if you want, but I don't see a problem with upgrading other than with a few 3rd party pieces of software. Myth busted.