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Vista is Microsoft's latest version of Windows. It came along accompanied by enormous fanfare, with all sorts of wonderful promises being made by Microsoft about how fantastic it was going to be and how gorgeous it was going to look. Has it lived up to the hype? With a background of many years as an IT engineer, I upgraded one of my PCs to Vista Home Premium and had a look around it from the point of view of both user and administrator.

Appearance-wise, it looks somewhat prettier than its predecessor, at least the desktop and various bits and pieces of eye candy scattered around do. But the Start Menu and Explorer window look surprisingly crude, in a sort of old-fashioned font against a flat white background, which looks more early 90s than late 2000s, as if it was left unfinished, a strange contrast to the eye-candy desktop appearance.

Continuing beyond the new look, I quickly found that using the operating system itself is often annoying and frustrating. Due to the new UAC (User Account Control) feature, which was implemented with the intention of giving better security, you now find yourself having to click several dialogue boxes to do the simplest things, such as deleting a file. And after all the clicking, it now also takes several times longer for the file to delete than in XP. You sit there watching a 'deleting file' message for what seems like forever, rather than it being instantaneous as it used to be. In the end, I had to turn UAC off as I was so fed up with all the clicking and with it taking so much longer to perform simple tasks than I was accustomed to.

Administering it is a pain too, as I discovered the first time I had to troubleshoot a networking problem. The method of doing so has been changed out of all recognition from previous Windows versions and is not at all straightforward or intuitive, and it was only by sheer lengthy trial and error that I was able to solve the problem.

And finally, my frustration was compounded when I installed and tried running some of my games. Nearly all of them needed some type of compatibility hack or another that I had to laboriously search for on the Internet, due to Vista not being able to recognize that the game's CD was in the drive, or some other completely unnecessary problem.

Once I got a few applications working, it was just sort of OK to use but I couldn't see any advantage over XP. I also noticed that everything was much slower than it had been with XP on the same PC. It's somewhat faster at booting up than XP was, but that really doesn't make up for how slow it is once it's running.

I have now repartitioned my PC to dual-boot XP and Vista, and use XP nearly all of the time, with Vista there just in case I need to run something that actually requires Vista, such as games that require the latest version of Direct X, which is no longer being updated for XP.

Basically I would say that Vista is just about tolerable if all you're going to do is very basic things like surf the Net, a bit of word processing and a bit of email, don't mind having to click through several dialogue boxes every time you want to perform simple tasks, don't have any problems with your network connection, and don't play games.

So all things considered, I would advise that if you're running XP with all the latest service packs, then unless there is a specific need to upgrade to Vista, do what I'm doing: wait for Windows 7 and just hope it's a better product.

Learn more about this author, Esmeralda Draic.
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