If you are one of those average users planning to upgrade your computer, you will most probably be wondering if you should be targeting for Windows Vista. Many of those who asked for my advice had initially think Vista is the way to go. My answer, no. At least not at this moment unless you are a programmer who needs to write programs compatible with Vista. And an even bigger ‘no’ if you are an avid gamer as most games still do not run on Vista.

First thing, we will have to look at is the advantages of Windows Vista over Windows XP. In simple layman’s term, Vista is aesthetically better, and have better security than Windows XP. And that’s about it. (For a more detailed comparison, see Windows Vista Advantages.)

The ‘XP’ in Windows XP actually stands for eXPerience.
But some prefer to call it Windows eXPired.

But there are also disadvantages that comes with Vista. First and foremost will be the high system requirements just for the sake of having an aesthetically better user interface. For the arm and leg that you will pay for the new computer, the Vista Aero interface will cost you the arm. And do you know that Vista comes in 6 different editions with 4 levels of visual styles? So which version is the one with the Aero interface? The more expensive ones. Besides that, softwares and drivers compatibility is still an issue until this day.

Minimum requirements to run Vista with Aero (from Microsoft):
- 1GHz Processor, 1GB RAM, and 128MB DirectX 9 GPU
Requirements to run Vista with Aero comfortably (from Internet community):
- 1GHz Processor, 2GB RAM, and 256MB DirectX 9 GPU

Some might have the opinion that the security improvement is enough reason for the upgrade. Is it really so? Had your computer really been hacked during the XP period? Or is it just some virus infection because you were careless. Did you suffer any real losses from these incidents? Here’s a point to ponder; any system is vulnerable if the user is careless about security. Not updating the anti-virus software, downloading and running files from unknown sources, etc… these will get your computers infected no matter if it is 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista or even Windows 2200AD. Yes, most computer viruses nowadays will not survive in Vista. But keep in mind that when more users change to Vista, the viruses will adapt as well. It has happened with all versions of Windows and there is no reason why Vista should be the exception.

So exactly how many Vista users do we have today? According to the statistics from W3Counter, as of March 2008, there are only 6.93% of Windows Vista users compared to 78.78% Windows XP users. A list of statistics from Wikipedia puts Vista market share to be around 6.93% to 14.02%. Yes, business is picking up for Vista but at a really slow rate. Vista was released on November 2006 and it has been more than a year now.

So my advice is stay put with XP at the moment and enjoy the blazing speed of multi-core processors. The time will come when we all will be ‘forced’ to upgrade to Vista. And trust me, when the time comes, we will all know. My guess is one year from now would be a good time to change to Vista. About two years from now, most will be ‘forced’ to upgrade. But isn’t Windows 7 expected to be released sometime in 2010? Well, maybe most of us will just go from Windows XP to Windows 7 and bypass Windows Vista altogether.

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- Written on Thursday, April 17, 2008 12:40 - 2 Comments -