Windows Vista - what's all the fuzz about?

I read a lot of computer and photo magazines to try to keep up on what is happening in the computer and photo world. During the last year, most computer magazines have been full of stuff about Windows Vista. Some time ago, I installed Vista to try out this fantasic new operating system. Installation went smoothly and pretty quick. No error messages. I logged in and soon discovered my raid disks were not seen by Vista. After some googling on the Net, I found there is no Vista support for the raid controller I'm using. Well it doesn't matter too much as I will only be using Vista for testing our software. All developement will still be done on Windows XP for quite some time. And, by the way, PixFiler (http://www.pixfiler.com/) works fine with Vista.

Now I've been playing with Windows Vista for some time and I honestly cannot see what all the fuzz is about. Yes, the Aero Interface do look nice. Very nice. Even older applications written for older Windows versions looks nicer on Vista Areo, but they don't perform any better (some may perform much worse). And applications are really why you bought that computer. Windows is just the software that makes the computer run, it doesn't do much useful. For that you need other applications. And they are what counts.

Microsoft says one of the reasons to upgrade is the increased security Vista offers. May be this is correct, but Microsoft has always claimed Windows XP was safe. I suppose most of us know XP had it's "holes", but how can we be sure Vista is better? I don't know.

In my humble opinion, upgrading to Vista is just a waste of money if you're already running XP SP2. However, if you buy a new computer you should make sure you get Vista as long as it doesn't cost any extra (or too much extra). It's really nice looking and older applications feel more up to date. But, you should check that the applications you want to run work under Vista.