Others say...

"The system delivers too little and wastes your time"
I have the "business" version installed. I depend on a reponsive systemfor my livelyhood. VISTA does not deliver. WHomever designed does not have the end user in mind. It forever is going into a heavy disk activity mode and freezes the user out during this period. in esence you are not able to do any work until it gets done doing "what ever". XP-pro is a more dependable application. Maybe if Microsoft ever gets this worthless system to work I will use it until then Goodbye Microsoft VISTA. Maybe Apple has something to sink my teeth into.

"Do your research people..."
I installed this with no problem and absolutely love it. I enjoy the Vista interface and have found the navigation to be pretty user friendly.

Before anyone installs this, they have to do their homework. Microsoft offers a Vista Upgrade Advisor to let you know of potential problems with your current hardware and also software that you currently have installed on your system. If you decide to go maverick and install anyways then you get what you get...a mess.

I had a friend that didn't do his research and guess what. I got the call that Vista is crap. WRONG! He didn't do his homework. So I ended up helping him reinstall XP to factory and THEN installing Vista. He is rocking and rolling now.

So people, do your homework and here's some advice. Run the Vista Upgrade Advisor, look at the programs you all ready have installed and get in touch with the vendor to make sure their software plays nice with Vista. If it doesn't then look at incurring a fee to buy the version that does. If you look at everything in advance then there are no suprises; and yes, Norton Internet Security will have to be upgraded to the Vista capable version but I all ready knew that because I did my homework.

"Pretty...useless"
I'm going to make this as brief as possible. I don't like doing Microsoft Upgrades, as a rule, becaue they very seldom work well and there always seems to be a hidden problem that only surfaces after you think things are going well.

I've been a systems admin for thirteen years and over that time, I've learned a few things about Microsoft. First - I never apply the first version of any service pack. This lesson was learned the hard way back in the NT 4.0 days. Second - Always back up your computer before applying an upgrade (you'll be glad you did).

The only reason we decided to purchase the Vista upgrade was to determine if it was a viable approach to upgrading our desktops at my company. We were concerned about some of our legacy program's (anything that hasn't been updated in the last five years) compatibility with Vista and applied this upgrade to one workstation which is based on a standard company image. For the typical workstation, Vista appears to have all the necessary drivers and even our dual screen nVidia video cards work despite the warning that they might be incompatible (this is not old technology!).

So, after a very lengthy install process (you'd never know the days of installing Windows 95 on a 386 were history!!) the workstation upgrade was nominally successful. The ONLY advantage from our standpoint is that it's "prettier". You must get used to a completely different UI and figure out where Microsoft has decided a better place for something should be. NOTE TO MICROSOFT: Change for the sake of change doesn't automatically improve anything!

The caveat to this whole upgrade is that when I ran the upgrade on my personal workstation, it went well, judging by initial appearances. I disabled the security programs to eliminate the nagging "Are you sure you want to do this" nanny software, BUT, in the background there was always some vigorous hard drive activity. I disabled indexing and off-line caching and then discovered the real issue: Vista was resetting all my permissions on my hard drives and this, in turn, was causing a lot of my programs to fail due to "rights" issues.

Essentially Vista was sabotaging itself, by reducing me from an Administrator on my own machine to a restricted user. Did I bother to chase down the cause of this behavior and resolve it? For the remainder of that day I attempted to restore my ownership and authority, but Windows Vista had become a mad dog and my instinctive reaction, evetually, was to KILL IT! I formatted my drive with a sigh of resignation and relief and restored my XP Pro installation and have lived without Vista ever since.

Will I give Vista a second chance later on? Probably, but only because progress is irresistible and I will sooner or later HAVE to conform. Until that ominous day arrives, I will avoid the inevitable for as long as possible.

One thing seems to be sure: I have learned from some unfortunate dial-up users (get broadband, people!) that buying a brand new PC with Vista means you end up with a worthless mutant PC. The dial-up connection is too slow for Vista to do it's thing and you end up not being able to do anything until you get broadband or take your machine in to a place that has broadband to complete the personalization and registration processes.

So, if you HAVE to do Vista, do it from scratch and have a good internet connection. Good luck!!

"DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY"
Everything you are reading about this nasty program is correct. While it looks cool and has a very nice new Graphical User Interface... that's about all it does. It is by far the worst Windows update ever! I got my DVD today and performed the upgrade... which it would not do, and needed to install a clean copy of Vista. The entire process took about 50 minutes... WITHIN 30 minutes I was already doing a factory restore back to XP Media Center... NONE OF MY XP programs worked with Vista. Wait until they fix this horrible program! DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY!!! It's not worth it. This version has NO features... all the Media Center options are totally removed from the Business upgrade... All around it's a nightmare. PS you have to buy special Vista Anti-Virus... there are not many companies offereing "FREE" upgrades to Vista.

MICROSOFT... WHAT A MESS YOU HAVE MADE! Does anyone remember Windows ME? Yeah I didn't think so... well meet the new Windows ME!

So Sad!

"My experience with Vista Business Upgrade"
It's late at night and this will be a quick review based on my experience with VISTA business. I've only used the product for a week.

First, i'm at experienced PC user and like to always keep up to date with the latest hardware. I was reluctant to upgrade to VISTA at first because it didn't support my online postage provider's software (so I thought) as well as a game I play (that's now supported, but wasn't at first).

The one big thing that held me back from the upgrade is that Microsoft sure loves to confuse the customer. Until I ran the Upgrade Advisor I had no clue that the Vista Home Premium Upgrade couldn't be used to upgrade XP Pro without a clean install. In the end I had to go with this version. I normally refuse to upgrade an OS without doing a clean install first. That's for a very good reason! One last thing I don't like about Vista is that you can't do a VISTA clean install with the upgrade without first installing XP. Why is this?

So, I opened the box and put the disc in after removing several programs from startup such as my anti-virus program. The upgrade went perfectly fine and I ran into no problems at all. I was never once asked for a driver disc. Really.

At first I was surprised at how much background hard drive activity there was at first even when the system was not doing anything. I fixed that by disabling some things in Vista that run in the background. That seemed to help and I don't experience this as much anymore. Overall, programs seem to run just as fast as they did in XP. Maybe a little slower, but I haven't noticed much at all.

All my old programs ran fine. My online postage software, Internet Security software and even my Video Capture program. So far I haven't found anything that hasn't run properly, but that'll probably change soon.

I did however have one graphical glitch. There was a weird halo effect around my mouse pointer. It seemed to clear up a little bit when I installed some new Nvidia Beta drivers for my 7800GT. It still occurs, but rarely.

I also had some problems with the Windows Switcher randomly going to non-3d mode. I didn't realize at first it will not work in 3d mode without the Aero theme enabled. I don't understand why this is.

To be truly honest, i'm generally not a fan of Microsoft products. I'll use them and that's about it. I really thought i'd hate Vista, but I actually like it.. a lot actually. Sorry to sound like a commercial, but I really enjoy using it. I really have no clue why it's so expensive though! The price is way too high. The basic edition is priced ok, but I don't get why the other versions cost so much more.

I'm sure i'll come up with some bad things to say eventually. A few things have been annoying, but I can fix them with a little work. I'm quite annoyed that at default you can't delete or save to the root directory of C: without special permission. No big deal.

The backup feature is nice. I currently have my entire drive backed up every morning at 8am through the Windows Task Scheduler. There was no "easy" way to do this. I had to do some checking online for the settings to add this to the task scheduler.

I also found it strange that the other got I received an error message saying I couldn't edit video from an external drive without copying it to my main drive first! Hopefully I can figure out why this occured. Something I can fix quickly I hope.

Overall, I like it a lot. I definitely wouldn't bother installing it on a computer that's over a year old though. I imagine it would be pretty slow.

4-302-2007 UPDATE:

I've had way too many problems with VISTA. I've wiped my drive and reinstalled XP. Several programs would not run at all or crash for no reason. Even with the latest versions. I also found that several of my old programs ran incredibly slow. I have a fairly high end PC too with 2gb of ram. I kept everything updated and was never able to fix all my graphical glitches in VISTA at all. At first some of the "annoyances" didn't bother me, but after weeks of using this version of Windows i've just gotten sick and tired of them. I felt like I had no control over my system at all. I also did not feel safe using Vista. There's always something going on and using up CPU power without it showing up in the task manager. I understand this is how VISTA works, but it's annoying and I never tried turning off these features.

Just a note that if you want to reinstall Windows XP you'll most likely need to wipe the hard drive. I tried four times and couldn't reinstall XP with Vista still on the drive. It was pretty much hell and I gave up and wiped the drive. Back to XP. I now feel terrible for giving this OS a 4/4. I'd now give it a 3/5.