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Deciding when to upgrade is a difficult choice. Usually it makes more sense to buy a new computer with Vista installed, since system builder versions of Vista Home Premium and Ultimate are a lot cheaper when bought as a whole.

Systems that are sold with pre-installed versions also mean that they have to go through a series of thorough checks to see if they are powerful enough to run the specific version of Vista.

If you like tinkering with the computer, then make sure that the computer has a decent amount of main memory (2GB is fairly cheap) and at least a NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT and above graphics card (the new 8500GT is recommended if you also want to get an HDDVD or blu-ray drive later on).

Gaming under Vista will take off once high-end graphics technology trickle down to the mainstream {Lost Planet by Capcom is coming out next month for DX10}, as well as making the nagging pop-up boxes disappear (I personally disabled the pop-ups asking you to run a program straight away via admin).

Specialists in the computer builder community are waiting for the first service pack from Microsoft to make things more compatible and reduce the amount of errors. At that time, sales of Vista will take off and maybe eventually replace XP as the operating system of choice.

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