You can’t read any tech message boards online at the moment without finding a whole host of people slagging off the new Windows Vista Operating System from Microsoft. While I should have really upgraded months ago, when the OS was first released, I’ve been hanging onto my old XP machine doggedly, but when it finally XPired last week, It was time to get a new machine, and it came with Vista.

Finally, a chance to really get to grips with the new OS, and see what all the fuss was about.

The most frequent complaint I have heard about Vista is that it is a resource hog that needs too much power for ordinary users to offer. Well, my new laptop is hardly the most expensive model on the market, but it has 1GB of ram, and a dual core processor. It runs Vista just fine, and I suspect that any PC less than 2 years old will too. I’m willing to bet that people who are having problems with the OS are running it on computers that are not quite up to the standards set out on the MS website.

The second problem is compatibility with existing hardware. Again, this is not an issue that I have had at all - mind you; all the hardware I’m currently running Vista with is pretty new. Even the printer is less than a year old. I suspect that the reason why certain older items are not running with Vista is that the manufacturers of those products are not willing to supply drivers to Microsoft to run a product that they want users to upgrade from.

Finally, I’ve heard a lot of people claiming that the interface is stolen from Apple, and that it looks ugly. Nonsense, it looks great, better than XP - unless you did a skin replacement on it - and although it is similar to OSX on Apple, well, that was a shinier version of XP anyway, albeit with some nice effects.

I often get the impression that people want Microsoft products to fail simply because they are produced by Microsoft, and that’s a real shame. Vista has some problems for sure, but none of them are showstoppers, and as long as your PC meets the specs on the MS website, and you aren’t hoping to plug in any pensionable printers, you should be fine with Vista.