Three weeks ago I took the plunge and upgraded my laptop from Windows XP (I have an ubuntu install on there as well) to Windows Vista Ultimate in order to check it out and make sure it will work with the software we use here at work. After hearing about messy upgrades and the tightened security in Vista, I was a little leery of the whole process, but I was surprised by the ease of upgrade.

The upgrade was seamless, the laptop went from windowsXP to Vista with out any problems. I have had to upgrade several drivers (mostly video drivers) and reinstall some of my software (itunes and an ISO mounting program) in order for it to work correctly but otherwise it worked well. A couple of clicks disabled the security prompts (which weren’t that annoying to be honest…). I did not find though that vista was a vast improvement over windows XP.

The laptop in question is just over a year old, it is an HP Pavilion dv8000 model, dvdrw, 1gb memory, 2 100gb Harddrives, an ATI Radeon Express 200M video card, 1400×900 display and an AMD Turion64 cpu (the thing rocks). Ran XP wonderfully, runs linux like a champ. Vista seems slow and clunky at times. I do like the gadgets (though they don’t always work correctly) but it takes longer to boot and startup than it did under XP which is not an improvement. The overall gain in the gui isn’t that great when compared to XP or KDE or Gnome under linux (I actually think I prefer KDE with compiz fusion to the vista aero).

Am I upset I wasted the time to upgrade to vista? No. I can always reinstall XP (I still have the discs), though I wonder if it will free up the license for Vista so I can install it elsewhere… do I think everyone should upgrade to vista? No. Unless you’re buying a new PC, then it only makes sense to buy one with vista on it. Would I recommend Ultimate? Possibly, though if you’re using it in a strictly work environment, go with Business Plus or whatever and for home, definitely pick up the MCE Edition…

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