Why you should avoid Windows Vista like the plague (at least for now) Part 1

In this three-part article I will talk about three big reasons you should avoid "upgrading" to Windows Vista, at least for now. This is part one of three.


"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"

You may recognize the quote above from the old TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. The episode it was from involved the not-too-bright head of the radio station deciding it was a good idea to do a Thanksgiving promotion by giving away free turkeys -- how did he give them away? By throwing them out of a helicopter flying over the city!

Since domesticated turkeys can't fly, you can imagine it didn't go very well.

Out here in Hawaii, we have wild turkeys, which actually can fly. There was one in a tree outside my window earlier that made me think of this.

You may have heard of the new version of Windows, Windows Vista, that Microsoft started selling around the beginning of 2007.

Well, in my opinion, Vista is a real turkey, and it's flying about as well as the poor turkeys from that classic episode of WKRP.

In fact, the big irony is that I read recently that releasing Vista actually *increased* the sales of Windows XP! That's pretty sad.

There's three basic reasons I don't think you should get Vista. I could think of more, but let's keep it simple and stick to three big reasons. To keep the article fairly short, I'm going to cover the first one in this article, then the other two in separate articles.

Reason #1:

If you upgrade, you'll either need to get a brand new computer that's a lot more powerful than your old one, or you'll have to sink a lot of money into your old one to try to get it "up to speed".

You see, Vista is what we in the computer business like to call a "resource hog", which means it needs a lot of memory, a big hard drive, and a fast processor (computer brain) for it to work well. Especially if you want to use any of the newer features.

If you don't have at least a fairly high-end computer (and a new one, not a high-end PC from a few years ago) you either won't see most of the new features, or you'll be screaming at the computer in frustration at how slow it is.

So the only time to go to Vista would be if you're already planning to buy a new PC, otherwise you might spend a few hundred dollars getting up to speed, which is money that might be better spent towards a new computer.

And even then, I'd really suggest sticking with XP (or going with a Mac, but that's something to talk about in a different article).

In the next section of this article, which I'll send in a separate email, I'll talk about the second reason you don't want to get Vista, and how getting it could cause you big headaches, especially if you keep your old computer, or any older equipment.