Let's face it, Microsoft, the maker of Windows® and now the newest member of the Windows® family, Vista™, has no competition and is the driving force behind the entire wave of Information Technology. The point is this, let's assume, Linux (which is a copy and variant of UNIX, by the way), magically, vanishes. Like in that plastics commercial, how many people will be effected? Ok, let's try it with Apple. VMS, then? Assume we're all seated around the table, and hands are going up. When we come to Windows, well. Get the point? Everyone raises their hands. So, Microsoft, is big. No one needs to tell you that, right? So here's the deal. What happened with Vista? The first release of this OS, is possibly acceptable to some user, somewhere. We attempted to certify this OS for our uses and were not able to. We're sure Microsoft engineers are going without much sleep -- all of them, trying to fix things. Just for starters, the UAC is less than stellar. That is the User Access Control  has no trusted application list. You get to permit a file access operation a thousand times, as your application runs. Fortunately the UAC can be disabled with a registry tweak. The smart networking, isn't, and indeed has severe problems on every LAN we attempted to connect a Vista machine to. Now, although we attempted to tweak this, no matter what we came up with, the thing just refused to perform. This OS barely comes up with 512 Megabytes. That is, Vista itself requires more than 512 Megabytes of RAM just to load. We stuck a couple of sticks of 1 Megabyte a piece, bringing the machines to a very nice 2 Megabyte count. And although our "Windows Vista Experience Index", went up in each case, our experience, didn't.

We're sure the future is bright for Vista, but as of right now, that remains to be seen. Our recommendation is, wait for a future release of this OS, or for now, stick to XP.