We attended the Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch today and I feel like breathing a sigh of relief. It feels like Vista has been talked about for ages and now it’s finally here, and I hope that that is a good thing.
As tempting as it has been, I waited until Vista’s launch to actually install Vista on any of my computers. Beta testing the OS this past year didn’t tempt me much, even though I did follow the saga as it unfolded. At last, the big day has finally came and went and I now have a fresh copy of Windows Vista installed on my laptop. The slick new interface and all of Vista’s new tricks are impressing me more and more. But when it comes down to it all, what I care most about is performance and that is what would encourage me to upgrade and to tell others to upgrade. Vista eats up powerful computer systems but claims to pay you back with superior performance. I’m going to give this whole Vista thing a run, and see if that proves to be true.
Security is also a big issue for me. I’ve mostly enjoyed using Windows XP all these years, but I’m fed up with playing Nancy Drew every other week in the search to discover what spyware or virus is slowing down my system that day. (And yes I have an updated firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware program running). Anyway, I’m ready to take the plunge - but not completely. My run with Vista will first take place on my laptop. If my expectations are met I’ll make take the upgrade to my Desktop as well. I’ll keep you posted about my launch in to Vista.
And not to be left out, Office 2007 has also been launched. I’ve been beta testing it for a while now and I like the new features a lot. Unfortunately, I foresee tech support working overtime to assist the people who can barely function in previous versions of Microsoft Office as it is. The new ribbon interface is pretty intuitive, but people tend to have a hard time adopting to change, especially when the structure of a program has remained pretty static for over a decade. Is it worth the upgrade? Office 2007 is pretty solid and it has a slew of cool new features. So if you have the money to upgrade now, my opinion would be to go for it. But most folk will be fine holding on to their current version of Office for the meantime.
