Let's move on: Vista SP1

To me, it's surprising how so many people don't like Vista. I was at a bookstore last Sunday, and a quick read at the content of computer magazines showed a similar and worrying trend that claim Vista to be lousy, buggy, and a memory-hog. Many of these magazines do not do justice to the amount of effort the Vista team has put in, and definitely do not portray Vista accurately. They all claim that Vista is slow and requires expensive hardware to run well, that it is buggy and unreliable, that UAC sucks, and that it is inferior to XP.

Yes, Vista might run slower, that's true. But hey, when XP first released, wasn't that what people said about XP over Windows 2000? I mean, we can only expect each successive OS to run on more demanding hardware than before. How can a new OS, with more advanced features and UI, run better on slower hardware than it's predecessor? It doesn't make sense. Furthermore, what these magazines and articles miss out is the fact that you're trading the slower performance for more security, a better looking interface (Aero), and new features, such as Instant Search. To me, it's a fair trade-off. Vista is indeed more secure than any other version of Windows. I don't know how to put it, but it's frustrating how people simply dismiss Vista saying that it is worse than XP. Even close friends of mine are sticking with XP, and that baffles me. For me, I use Vista because it's the future of Windows. XP was the past, and it's no good clinging onto something so dated. It's high time for us to move on and adopt Vista. It's the best version of Windows yet I believe.

But why aren't people moving on? Paul Thurrott alludes XP to a comfortable but dirty old sweatshirt that you've been wearing for years. You know it's old, but yet you aren't willing to throw it away because you're too attached to it. And that's the biggest problem with Vista: they delayed it too much, in an attempt to release a polished OS, such that people get too familiar with XP and they become contented with it.

Well, now that SP1 is out, it may be time to reevaluate your stand. I've been playing around with SP1 recently, it doesn't offer significant visual improvements, but improves performance such as time taken to move files etc.

Let's move on. Vista is the future of computing, not XP.