ergophobe - 5:11 pm on Feb 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

After posting a "Vista: Get Ready for Pain" thread when I first encountered the monster, I've changed my tune.

As an individual, not someone who has to maintain corporate system, I think if you work with Vista for a couple of months, you will choose it as your primary MS OS. I have Vista on one machine, XP on another now that I inherited a new laptop. The main difference on the machines is memory - 2GB on Vista and 1GB on XP, but I'll be changing that because XP machine is slow.

Previously I had Win2K on one machine and XP on my wife's laptop, which I was using quite a bit. I never once felt a desire or need to upgrade to XP and in general just always preferred Win2K, but mostly didn't see any meaningful difference between the two. With Adobe CS3, 2K was no longer supported and I had to choose and, because of pricing alone, went with Vista (which for various reasons was a *lot* cheaper for me).

My curve with Vista was like this
- day 1: desire to shoot myself
- week 1: desire to shoot Bill Gates
- week 2: desire to shoot my computer
- week 3+: "how the hell do I..." frustration at stupid new interface.
- month 1: grudging accomodation, finding some things I like
- month 2+ invisibility - the new interface is my default. It's okay.
- month 4+: now finding myself splitting time between machines and working on an XP box again after several months of Vista-only, when I'm on the XP box, wishing it had Vista.

Just the start box application launcher saves me time during the day and now navigating through my start menu to find applications has become incredibly annoying. Launchy helps, but it just isn't as nice as the Vista system for me. And I like the look and feel and some other minor usability improvements. I didn't really notice them, but now increasingly I find myself flummoxed when I'm on XP.

What I dislike
- can't run multiple IEs without virtualization
- a few install issues that I had to work around

Still, my experience with how seemingly tiny interface improvements make you see how annoying the old system is makes me not so much a fan of Vista, but thinking that I was wrong to discount the differences between Windows and Mac. It's easier for me to see how those small refinements really add up during a long day in front of the computer. If I didn't own any software at all, I would probably go for a Mac at this point, but not wanting to buy Mac versions of everything, I'm stuck with MS for now and Vista is, FOR ME, the lesser of three evils.

Put it this way,if I were shopping for a Windows computer and had to decide between two computers, both easily Vista-ready, one having XP and one having Home Premium, I would choose the latter, but wouldn't pay more than a few dollars for it. I would however not pass up a good deal just because of Vista.