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The Verdict on VistaIs the new Windows any good?

By Paul BoutinPosted Monday, Jan. 22, 2007, at 3:56 PM ET

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The wait is almost over for Windows Vista. Microsoft wants us to believe that when its new operating system finally debuts on Jan. 30—a date that's been five years in the making—our world will be turned upside down. Redmond's marketers have dubbed Vista's release as a "wow moment—that instant when you recognize that your life has changed." That's according to a letter from Bill Gates himself.

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Tech reviewers couldn't agree less. "Worthy, largely unexciting," yawned Walt Mossberg in his pacesetting Wall Street Journal review. Mossberg makes the "pleasant," "efficient" Vista sound less like a "wow moment" than a passable bore—the Canada of operating systems.

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In April, Paul Boutin explained why he wants Apple to license OS X to PC users. Boutin also theorized that consumers wouldn't like a potential Google PC and argued that a giant screen—not a new operating system—is the ultimate computer upgrade. Four years ago, Steven Johnson asked if the computer desktop was a dying metaphor.

I think Gates and Mossberg are both wrong. Operating systems shouldn't be exciting. Like a good government, a good OS should mostly get out of the way. It needs to stay up and running, prevent invasions from intruders, and avoid ugly surprises. When judged by those criteria, Vista is up to the task. Also, Mossberg should remember this: In 2005, when Apple's OS X debuted many of the features that he now considers boring, he gushed about how innovative they were. Now that this futuristic stuff is available to the PC masses, it's uninteresting—to a reviewer. But who really cares about the horse race? Isn't who came first less important than which product is better today?

So, should you buy this worthy, largely unexciting, Mac-plagiarizing operating system? The good thing is that you don't have to get your answer from me, Walt Mossberg, or any tech columnist. Download and run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, a handy program that will take you between one and five minutes to install and run. You'll get a tidy report that shows which (if any) of the four editions of Vista—Basic, Premium, Business, and Ultimate—your PC can run, and which (if any) of your hardware devices don't have Vista-ready software yet. If you've got an 800 MHz processor and 512 megabytes of RAM, your machine is Vista-capable. A 1.5 GHz CPU will do a lot better.

If you don't have enough RAM, you can plug in a $20 USB flash drive and Vista will use that for extra memory. Clever! But if your computer lacks a buff graphics card and can't handle a new one—my 2006 Dell lacks the wattage for a new card—you'll have to run Vista Basic, which lacks the Premium edition's sexy desktop graphics. Premium also adds Windows Media Center software that lets you watch TV on your PC. The Business and Ultimate editions add remote access, file backup, and anti-theft tools most home users won't care to use. (Pricing is complicated. It runs from $100 for a DVD that will only upgrade one PC already running XP to Vista Basic to $400 for a complete copy of Vista Ultimate. You can buy extra licenses for less.) If your PC is two years old or older, it'll most likely only run Basic. That's one reason Microsoft expects that only 5 percent of users will upgrade their existing PCs. Most will get Vista when they buy their next machine.

Microsoft's Vista site lists dozens of pages of features and benefits to make it seem like it's a no-brainer to buy a new Vista-ready PC. The tech-support team I share office space with dismissed one after the other as freely available XP add-ons. Internet Explorer 7? "Got it." Little thumbnails of your application windows? "See XP PowerToys." Desktop search tool? "You reviewed it in 2004." Still, after two weeks slogging through Microsoft's checklist, I found plenty of reasons to go Vista. If these six items sound appealing, you should strongly consider an upgrade.

Desktop Improvements. Everything from the Start menu onward is more organized and easier to use. Instead of sprouting multilevel menus like ivy all over your screen, the Start button keeps its program menus and search results in a single window, as shown in this screen shot. Another long-overdue improvement is that you can place live, Mac-style "gadgets" on the desktop: a calendar, a news ticker, and dashboard gauges that show CPU and memory use.

The Premium edition's Aero interface (also in the Business and Ultimate packages) goes even further. Aero uses your PC's graphics card, which is designed for the hard-core visual processing required by video games, to deliver an eye-popping desktop makeover. What were once boxy menus and window borders now have glasslike, semitransparent edges. (A tip to the horse-race followers: The new iPhone prototype has transparent menus, too.) The transparencies make it easy to read through windows to see what's behind them, and makes the operating system vanish into the background so you can focus your eyes on pictures, movies, or editing. To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check out this sexy red-themed screen shot.

One of my favorite Aero touches is the Flip feature, which lets you see all your windows at once (see this screen shot). I also love the pop-up thumbnails of task-bar items, shown here, that are easier and faster to distinguish than tiny text labels. Vista will even let you flip through your windows as a 3-D card deck. I think this is silly, but my poker-playing friends took to it instantly.

On my slower PC, which is running Vista Basic, many windows still hesitate when redrawing and leave ghost images behind when I drag them around the screen. These are classic Windows annoyances that Vista Premium's Aero interface has finally done away with, even on laptops. For years, laptop buyers have paid extra for ATI and NVIDIA graphics processors that only come into play during video games. Now, Vista puts these pricey chips to work to draw everything on the screen better and faster. But remember the bad news here: It's likely that you'll need to buy a new PC to take advantage of Aero's graphics-intensive user interface. (Run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to make sure.)

SuperFetch. Vista figures out what applications you use at which time of day or day of the week. It then schedules the ones you're most likely to use and preloads them into the PC's memory. Your e-mail and calendar will be ready to go on Monday morning, and your anti-virus software won't be in the middle of a full scrub when you come back from lunch. It doesn't always guess correctly. Still, I spend less time listening to my disk drive whenever I sit down to work.

Stability and Security. For once, I believe Microsoft's promises. Insiders say the Windows division got religion about squashing bugs and writing hacker-proof software during the latter days of XP's development. Division president Jim Allchin came back from a sabbatical enraged by Windows bugs that had spoiled his vacation. "I saw what a flaky mess this thing is," he confessed to LinuxWorld columnist Doc Searls. Allchin's bug stomp-a-thon contributed to Vista's five years of production delays. Good for him. Solidly written software is harder to crack, too. I won't get phone calls from worried relatives about the Vista virus of the week like I did for XP.

Previous Versions of Files. If you accidentally mis-edit or overwrite a document, you can right-click the file to bring up a "Previous versions" menu. Computers have had this capability for years—it's called journaling—but it's a big step forward to place the old versions in a pop-up menu so nontechie users can easily discover them. It sounds boring, but wait'll it saves your bacon when you're on a deadline.

Presentation Mode. If projecting PowerPoint slides from your laptop is a make-or-break part of your job, you'll love this: You can finally tell your OS not to bother you with IM popups, beepy noises, or the screensaver.

Upgrade Process. I upgraded computers hundreds of times in my past life as a support guy and software developer. The XP-to-Vista move was my smoothest Windows transition ever. The installer gave me a tidy, clickable report of three device drivers it couldn't guarantee would still work in Vista. Two were for old programs I'd stopped using long ago, the other for the software I used to connect to my BlackBerry.

Most of my XP-era applications work fine in Vista, but iTunes—a mission-critical app for me—has hung a couple of times when I quit the program. And if my DSL goes out this week, I won't be able to plug in the BlackBerry to get online. I'm hopeful, though, that driver updates will appear soon after Jan. 30 to fix both problems.

That leads to my final advice: You've waited five years for Vista. That means you can probably wait a bit longer. No software is bug proof, and every new OS gets patched a few times in its first weeks of public life, after the masses start using it and the black hats start cracking it. I'm enjoying the new features I've listed, but you won't die without them. If $100 for the Basic upgrade disc or $150 for Premium breaks your budget, save your cash until it's time to buy a new PC, even if that's not until 2008. Unlike past major Windows revisions, you won't find yourself barred from interacting with those who upgrade—you'll just envy them a little.