There's nothing really
wrong with Vista. I upgraded when I built my current desktop over the summer because XP didn't want to play nice with my RAID array. XP wouldn't recognise there was any sort of RAID going on without drivers being loaded from a 3.5" drive I don't have, whereas Vista picked it up right away and installed quite happily, so I went with it.
Vista's plug & play capabilities are a marked improvement over XP's as well. It's recognised and installed drivers for every phone, PDA, MP3 player, thumb drive, etc that I've plugged into my machine with no need to deal with driver CDs or scrounging around on the internet for them. It's even installed driver support for some obscure stuff like the IR receiver that came with my laptop (receiver for
what I don't know, I didn't even know that's what it was until I plugged it in and Vista told me).
In terms of more noticeable improvements, the new Start menu has pretty much ruined XP for me. If you've used the Linux KDE application launcher, it'll feel pretty familiar and it makes previous iterations of the Start menu seem painfully unwiedly by comparisson. I'm actually surprised MS didn't make a bigger deal out of it when they released Vista, but maybe they just couldn't think of a nice way of saying, "Hey guys, it took us 12 years, but the Start menu's actually useful now!"
That being said, it is a fair bit more resource-intensive than XP, but then XP is coming up on it's 7th birthday while Vista is a few months shy of it's 2nd. Obviously an OS designed with 2007 hardware in mind is going to ask more of one built for 2001 hardware, but that's little consolation if you're running a PC that's a few years old. The hardware requirements and the cringe-inducing pricetag are really the only criticisms that stand up to scrutiny. Most of the "Vista is more restrictive!" claims come from the inclusion of Protected Video Path support, but unless you're planning on using Vista to watch Blu-Ray movies on an HDTV, this won't really affect you. User Account Control is bloody irritating when you're setting up a new system, but it's easily turned off while you're installing all your applications and configuring everything the way you want it. I turned UAC back on a couple months ago, and it hasn't bothered me once yet. Other than that, it'll let you do anything XP would, and in a lot of cases makes it easier. The fact that they got rid of XP's inane Simple File Sharing fills me with gleeful joy.
Frankly, I think a lot of the Vista criticism stems from the same mentality that led to people spamming Amazon with 1-star ratings for Spore because they didn't understand its DRM.
So after all that Vista fanboi-ism, is it worth upgrading to Vista? Not really. It's a good operating system, with lots of nice little improvements over XP, but there's no real compelling reason to upgrade, unless you really, really hate XP's Start menu.
