Many people are just totally uneducated when it comes to VISTA and now Windows 7.
There are many reasons to switch from XP to VISTA. (just to name a few)
- Greatly improved "Start Menu"
- Improved aesthetic appeal. (aero)
- Improved graphics engine, DirectX10 (granted there was no technological reason to omit it from XP
)
- Security in general is tighter (not perfect)
- Built-in speech recognition (actually works well)
- Windows Flip 3D
- Windows Indexing & Search
- Sidebar (baby steps...it was new and has been improved in Windows 7)
- Better Power Management (longer battery life for laptops)
- ReadyBoost (allows USB flash sticks to be used as system memory - RAM)
- SuperFetch (pre-loads your most-used applications onto system memory thus speeding-up application load-times)
- Backward Compatibility (I have yet to have a piece of software not work on VISTA)
- x86 emulation on a x64 installation (I have run into very few applications there could not be emulated properly on my x64 instance of VISTA).
- amazing backup feature (Home Premium and Ultimate only)
As for switching from VISTA to Windows 7
- Multi-touch, provided you have hardware to support this (similar to MS Surface project)
- Native support for many media formats (H.264, DivX, etc...), this is nice since you won't have to install 3rd party apps to play your videos (HD/SD alike).
- GPU Acceleration (modern graphic cards can crunch numbers at a ridiculous rate).
- More convenient taskbar (basically quick-launch but much more attractive and useful)
- handwriting recognition (works with the touch screen capability)
- finally, a new version of paint (I think I'll still stick with GIMP
)
- improved widgets (incorporated into desktop, behind your work).
- improved startup/shutdown times.
- improved memory management.
- improved organization (keeps track of your music/movies/docs/etc..., regardless of where they are on your hard drive(s)
).
- ability to install 3rd party themes without modifying (hacking) system files.
- pretty much all of VISTA's features, including UI design.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a MS fanboy, it pisses me off that:
- they release 4 different versions of VISTA and will likely do the same for Windows 7 (annoying
).
- they still haven't implemented that new filing system (Win FS).
- Windows 7 is coming-out too soon after VISTA.
- VISTA has major issues when transferring files over a network (XP is way faster), I hope Windows 7 does not have this.
- VISTA has no native support for different wallpapers on multiple monitor setup (currently have to either install 3rd party app, or create a large image and tile it
), I hope Windows 7 supports this natively.
- MS released VISTA pre-maturely (it needed more QA testing
)
After all is said and done, I really like the new UI, I find it intuitive, and much more convenient for everyday use.
Every person that I've introduced to VISTA, after seeing how it actually runs, love it. The majority of these people were among the many who'd say "VISTA is a waste of time...it doesn't work."
While VISTA and Windows 7 will run more slowly on an older PC, that is to be expected.
VISTA and Windows 7 can run with many of their features disables (such as aero) to accommodate lower-end PC's, but it's not fair to expect all of the eye-candy to work on a 5+ year old PC.
As consumers, we expect pretty substantial advances in the hardware that is available to us on a regular basis. As a result of the newer & more powerful hardware, it is only natural for the software to be designed to take full advantage of it, thus lesser/older PC's will struggle if all of those new features are enabled. If the software doesn't advance, what's the point of the advances in the hardware?