For those of you who don’t keep up on these things, Microsoft Windows Vista is hitting the retail shelves on January 30th 2007. It’s been available for businesses since November 30th 2006 and some OEM systems are shipping to consumers already. I had the opportunity about a month ago to install it on a PC in my house. It’s one pretty looking desktop.

Seriously, it’s very pretty and very functional… Kinda reminds of a Mac’s desktop usability. It even asks me 3 or 4 times if I am sure about a button I pressed, just like a Mac.

I can’t get video drivers even though I have the “Vista Ready” Nvidia GeForce 8800. Nvidia claims that the drivers will be available by January 30th, but they missed the release of November 30th by a long shot. It’s not sounding so “Vista Ready” to me.

My sound card has drivers available, I have the Sound Blaster X-fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro Series. There are a few glitches but nothing major yet.

My compiler is not fully functional on Vista either. I use the latest Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, so even Microsoft internally has not fully figured out how to deal with Vista’s changes. I installed Visual Studio but after trying for three hours to get things running right, I removed Visual Studio.

Most of the software I installed manages to run okay but a lot of it does not run at all. To be fair, I am running an Intel E6600 processor and Vista for 64 bit machines and thats a big change. Vista 64 is supposed to be able to run 32 bit software but my experience is that changes have to be made.

So basically, for the last month I have had this really cool looking desktop showing off it’s screen saver capabilities. I am here to tell you though, the screen saver is awesome, you have never seen 3-d pipes run so fast.

What you are really wondering is, should I buy Vista? If you were going to buy a new PC anyway then do it, otherwise wait. You have 12-24 months before you may have problems if you don’t (This is just my opinion).

Here are some things to think about before you switch to Vista:

You must check with every one of your software vendors to be sure their program runs under Vista. You really don’t want to assume everything is going to run correctly. If you are running some older software that you have not paid for version upgrades, be prepared to pay for a new version.

You want a new machine that says Windows Vista Ready… with Windows Vista Business Version pre-installed and running. You don’t want a machine that says Windows Vista Capable. Vista Capable is like saying a Yugo is highway capable. Indeed the Yugo can get on the highway but once your on the highway it’s likely to be a harrowing ride.

Vista comes in four editions, you really want Vista Business, this is the same as XP Home versus XP Professional. Most people that I know that purchased XP Home ended up going to XP Professional. I called this buying the other half of the Operating System.

My guess is that like it was for Windows XP most companies will not support the Home version for professional products. There will be just too much of the Operating System missing. I will let you know more when my compiler runs on Vista.

I would not recommend upgrading your current OS, I would recommend either a new machine or a fresh install. This is just my pessimism, but I have not had one OS upgrade work since going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 3.11. I try it every time on my experimental machines but it never works. Vista was no different.

If you decide that you want to wait, I would say you have 12-24 months before software vendors force the upgrade. Vista is very different at almost every level, most vendors will not put the resources into supporting two operating systems at the same time. You may get lucky and your vendors products will work with just some minor annoyances under Vista but I would start saving now for the IT upgrades.