A few months ago, I wrote about my opinions of Windows Vista, and stated that I wasn’t planning to use it.  Even now, none of the businesses I work with have running Vista machines – any computer supplied with Vista is quickly downgraded to XP.

Irrespective of my own opinions, Vista exists and simply cannot be ignored by someone whose bread and butter work is IT Support.  Therefore, earlier this month I installed Vista Business on my principal home computer (a Dell Latitude D820).  The completed installation isn’t perfect – I’m still hacking around with video drivers, although this is more a NVidia than Microsoft issue – but I am not as disappointed as I had expected to be.

Now, this isn’t my first experience of Vista.  I participated in the original Beta programme, and back then I wasn’t overly impressed when it completely neutered my test computer.  I have also played around with the original RTM versions of Vista, and I was certainly not thrilled by it.  However, after using it for just over three weeks, I have to admit that I am beginning to warm to it.  I don’t think I have suffered any particular life changing experience, I think Vista has thanks to Service Pack 1.  SP1 seems to have addressed a whole range of annoyances that had served as ammunition to my anti-Vista viewpoints.   Chief among these was its’ woeful performance when copying files to and from network drives and external devices.

Does this mean that I am a now a fully-fledged, paid up member of the I love Vista club? Well no.  I now consider its’ positives outweight the negatives, but it is still not the all conquering product that Microsoft promised.  Will I continue to use it?  Yes, and for the foreseeable future.  Am I giving up on XP?  No, and in fact I am actually typing this post on my antique Thinkpad T30 running XP.