If you read some forums or blogs these days, you'd think that Vista crashes every 5 minutes, will eat your programs and your files, and when the evil Microsoft monster is all done with that, it will end its spree of destruction by quite possibly eating your children.

Just so we are all clear here, Vista does NOT suck. Not even close. What you usually see online are mostly a bunch of undereducated Mac and Linux fanboys who are going to whine about anything Microsoft does.

I don't know what I am doing wrong, but my Vista installs (Home Premium at home on a desktop, as well as one desktop in the office and a laptop that gets bashed around pretty hard) are working great.

Why is Vista a good upgrade from XP

Vista's OS is stable. - PERIOD. I've been using it on my home and office computers for the last 7 months, and it has crashed exactly... never.  Its not as if these are not well used boxes, we put them through all kinds of hell and have tried to crash the system, I literally daily run a lot of programs at once, and install and uninstall software for review purposes over and over again. If a box can be crashed, we can do it here.

Vista comes with a ton of usable software, and usability features out of the box that alone will save you time, and money. Those that tell you that you should stick with XP, are not being completely honest. XP was a good operating system, however to make it work, the first thing you have to do is add a lot of other software just to make it usable. Think not, if you are on XP, there is about a 92% chance that you are running Google desktop. With Vista, the Google desktop application becomes superfluous. with Vista, you press the windows key, and you are at the command prompt, being able to access/run/search whatever you want on the computer.  Just this one feature is such a gigantic productivity win that everything else pales by comparison. 

There are a lot of other things that Vista does though, You get Media Center right out of the box, and if you are a media fan, as most of us are, you will love that feature. Windows actually comes with a set of truly great utilities: Calendar, DVD Maker, Movie Maker, Voice Recognition, and one of the best Photo Galleries we have ever seen. It makes iPhoto look like a kids toy in comparison.

Now, why do you keep hearing otherwise then?

There are actually a lot of reasons that you are hearing bad things about Vista, and most of them, when you actually take a look at them are simply complaints that are either not an operating system problem, not realistic, and at worst are outright blatant lies.

The biggest complaint, and the boldest outright lie is that Vista is a memory hog. This is a very common misperception, it has to do with how Vista caches your memory. In other words, it tries to anticipate what you are going to do and have it ready for you.  Look it up - it's called SuperFetch and it is a feature, not a problem. Why shouldn't it use all of your memory? Compare the startup time of Word 2007 on Vista vs WinXP. You'll be pleasantly surprised at what SuperFetch does for you.

The second thing we keep hearing about are incompatible applications. we do web development and we had like two old programs that were incompatible. I have yet to find a home user who had this problem. Is it possible? We suppose so, but most mainstream modern software is not a problem, the usual worst case scenario we see is that some programs must be run in administrator mode. That is a right click away.

Then there is the old standby. Vista is just too slow. No, it's not.  Your computer is too slow.  Vista is not meant to run on a 5 year old machine. It is a modern operating system. You just go try to install Leopard on a 5 year old Mac box and see what happens. Like almost every other operating system upgrade, most of the upgrading will be with new computer replacements. This argument is just insane, its like saying I cant play a DVD in my old VCR.

So Vista is perfect then right?

I wouldn't say that, like everything else it has its limitations, and some things that are just annoying to me. UAC (User Account Controls) for one, For the vast majority of users, UAC will offer a valuable level of security protection that will protect against malware: it simply won't have the rights to perform invasive actions like installing device drivers or services. For the power user, it is annoying. It can be turned off, but if you have a shared box as I keep at home, it should remain an annoyance.