I’ve been struggling about what to write about Vista in my conclusion for well over a week. How do you judge the new operating system fairly without being too judgmental and at the same time be unbiased? You can’t. I personally believe that each one of us has to weigh the pros and cons and then make our own conclusions factoring in cost and the most important factor - what we use our computer systems for.

And I could go into a long-winded presentation about price, hardware, software, and the other things that have already been discussed over and over, but why? You’ve heard and read about all of these before. In fact I just deleted three paragraphs of junk rehashing all of the above. Then it dawned on me that the answer was fairly simple.

OLD COMPUTER SYSTEM - If your system doesn’t have at least 1GB of memory and a dedicated video card with at least 128MB of video memory, I’d stick with XP. If your system is high end with 1GB of memory and a dedicated video card, I’d go for the upgrade.

OR, if you have to have the latest and greatest, bite the bullet and add more memory and a better display adapter, then upgrade. And the minimum upgrade would be to the Premium edition since Home doesn’t have Aero. Without Aero there is no eye candy and you’ll have a system that looks visually like XP. After using Aero and going back to XP, the XP interface looks almost cartoonlike, for lack of a better description.

NEW COMPUTER SYSTEM: You’re going to get Vista, so why worry?

CONCLUSION: This is exactly what I am going to do. I have one high end system that will run Vista just fine. But my other systems, especially one of the laptops, won’t support Aero because of the weak video display, which can’t be upgraded on the laptop. The other two desktop systems I have are in need of replacement, but work fine with XP and are mainly used for kids’ games and Web surfing.

Update: since writing this I determined that one of my laptops does support Aero. Seems like the MS update advisor was changed to include the ATI video on the laptop. I just have to up the RAM to 1G or more. So one laptop supports Vista and one laptop doesn’t.

Will I update the one laptop that supports Vista? Most likely no. It is working fine using XP Media Center. Besides, it belongs to my wife and she’d kill me if I messed up her stuff! LOL

[tags]vista, upgrade, premium edition, memory, video, aero[/tags]