Bought my copy of Vista on Launch day. Waiting, for this column to be filled with tales of WOW and Joy before installing. Have I much longer to wait.

Lots of Joy form me. 30 minutes to do a clean install at least 1 hour to configure drivers of devices. 2 hours to install software Notes to consider: 1. Have a Vista compatible antivirus ready to install. 2. go to user account options and disable the permision warning shown when installing a program. it can get realy frustrating. 3. have ready Vista drivers for graphics cards. winXP drivers might be problematic (happened for me for my Geforce FX card). consider changing graphics card if your existing is more than 1.5 years old. otherwise performance (both in windows and games) will be affected. 4. be careful with Vista firewall. it can block internet access to various software and it is a mess to enable it afterwards. 5. if a program does not instal or run due to compatibility error, try runing it in winXP or win98 compatibility mode. finally, be ready for everything and anything. you do not know what problem will appear. other than the above, it is fun for me to work with Vista.

You'll be waiting a while I figure. Some people have had luck but due to the lack of built-in windows drivers (memories of the "too early" release of XP) you have to hope your OEM vendors have Vista drivers ready for you devices. If they don't, chances are you won't be able to get most hardware running. I still think it's funny that Microsoft can get away with releasing software before it's time. As of Dec 06 when it was released to educational centers (I work at a University) there were already about 20 fixes for the OS. I suspect we'll be seeing a Service Pack fairly soon. Peronally, if I bother buying Vista, it'll be a while before I do. I'll wait until they have the bugs worked out (well, as many as they ever get worked out right) it's stable, has a reasonable amount of built-in drivers. In fact, I may just wait until I run into a game I want that won't play on XP......

I suspect we'll be seeing a Service Pack fairly soon. Flashback from Vista launch luncheon Press Q&A in NYC on January 31, 2007: Given the importance of M$ products due to their ubiquity, attention inevitably turned to the future even on the day Vista officially went out the door. In the short term, Ballmer denied that there is a date planned for a Windows Vista Service Pack 1. "The goal is not to need one," he said. "If we need one, we'll do one." i_XpUser

LOL XpUser...........ya gotta like it.......as I said, there were around 20 fixes before vista was ever released. Only M$ could get away with it. Any other software developer would quickly find themselves bankrupt if they released software they same way M$ does. How to read that statement between the lines and figure out what he's really saying: Ballmer denied that there is a date planned for a Windows Vista Service Pack 1 In English: "We (M$) have yet to decide how many security fixes we're going to wait for before making service pack one." "The goal is not to need one" In English: "We may decide to just scrap the whole service pack idea and just keep piling hotfix upon hotfix upon hotfix. It takes so much work and so many man hours to incorporate them into one package that we might save ourselves some $$$ and just scrap that idea anyhow." "If we need one, we'll do one" In English: "Unless Bill says to go for it, in which case we'll do it as he's the boss and I'm just a mouthpiece sent here to spout smoke at you"