Everyone knows that Microsoft® Windows Vista will eventually be the new XP; everyone will eventually be using it. But what are the pros and cons of the new operating system as it stands today?
                           

As with every new Microsoft® operating system, it’s been launched  without all the bugs being sorted out. I mean if they waited to get all the  bugs out they’d probably never release it. But in general I must say it’s been  much better than any of their previous launches. Everything seems to work  perfectly, and I’ve only heard of vista freezing once (on a slow machine) which  is a vast improvement from even XP. The interface needs to be learned so I’m  not going to regard that as a pro or a con.
                      

Let’s get down to it. What’s new that you really should lookout for and what is new which you really will love to hate? 

The Pros 

In this latest addition from Microsoft® Ai has become  standard, vista has a whole range of intelligent features that will really make  your experience better. The operating system learns your user style and adjusts  itself for you. For instance, when you run your favourite programs over and  over again, it recognises it. The more you open a program, the more of the RAM  will be preloaded when you start up. What this means for the standard user is  the more you open a program, the quicker your program will be to load. If vista  realises that you’re opening your MP3 player or outlook as soon as you start-up  every time, it’ll pre-load that data into the ram so that the start time of  those programs will dramatically decrease. In some tests I’ve seen outlook start-up  time go from 12 seconds to 8.                      

Upgrade with a flash drive: Vista has really come a long way  from XP, you can delegate vista to use the space on your USB flash drive as  RAM. Of course it’s not as quick as ram, but it is certainly quicker than a  virtual ram drive on your Hard Disk Drive. This is mainly used for the Ai that I  was mentioning before, if you’ve got an extra 1GB of memory to pre-load  programs, it certainly makes a difference especially on the slower machines.

Search with ease: The latest edition to the explorer browser  is a pre-indexed search from anywhere you are. This comes in handy every time you’re  looking for any file in pretty much any folder. It works very similar to the search in iTunes,  and is very quick (provided you have a quick computer) With a slower machine is  still works but well can be rather slow compared to a traditional search.

Compatibility: Microsoft really have went the step further  with compatibility this time. Every program can be run as if the older version  of windows was running it. Obviously drivers aren’t included here, but it has a  large support for all the older programs. This together with the Xbox360 compatibility  it really shows that Microsoft is putting more attention to user experience,  and trying to get done away with the error messages of “This program cannot be  run on this Operating System only compatible with Windows 98 and older”.          

The Cons

With every version of Microsft Windows you’ll always get a bunch of  things that you don’t like about it, no matter how good it is. But  this time I could find very little to criticise, two points came to my mind though.
              
Security: One major issue that I think every user’s going to  have a problem with for the first few weeks (again the Ai learns what you like  or not so this goes away with regular use) is the constant security warnings that  users get for the first few weeks of use. For every program you run it’ll ask “allow  or deny” for almost everything. Now this is annoying at first but it will learn  what you keep allowing and learn what you keep denying. Once it learns exactly  what programs you want or don’t want; it’ll be one of the most secure operating  systems to date.

Looks: I’ve put this  under con, when some say it should be a pro. This is a personal preference  because they’ve upgraded the looks and don’t get me wrong they look absolutely  stunning, but these stunning looks come at a cost. All slower machines will have  a hard time running vista efficiently. The graphic demand just running the  system seems to be a lot higher than some games I’ve seen before.  But you can turn off the aero function, which  means that the graphics demand is a lot lower and gives your processor and graphics  card a break.

So all in all, generally all the cons I’ve come across are  only temporary, and can be easily fixed or they’re fixed over time anyway. The  sooner you get Vista the sooner the system will learn your user style and heck,  if you’re going to end up getting it anyway; it might as well be sooner rather than  later.

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