So I switched to Vista. In fact, I’m typing on it right now.

Does that offend you? Did you just suffer, like most of my friends, from the “Ew, Vista?” reflex. It smells like acid-reflux breath in all my friends lately.

But despite its many flaws, Vista has a lot of potential. First let me talk about what pisses me off about it. It is an absolute memory hog. I was bleeding into virtual my memory (hard drive acting like RAM), when my RAM had almost a gig to play with already. Truth be told Microsoft seems to be trying to look a lot more like Mac. The main difference is, Vista doesn’t “just work.”

What I really can’t stand is the USB induced blue screens I keep getting. And this is on a new Acer Aspire, only a couple months old. Any time I plug in a new camera or thumb drive, I’ve gotta jump through hoops to make it work without crashing my system.

But these are all things that will be ironed out and I think anyone with the ability to look ahead in the software development time line will see that. Vista was designed to create a pleasurable user experience. Microsoft seems to realize that most PC users don’t get beyond Excel, Word and FireFox as far as computing goes. So why not make it a bit more enjoyable?

Windows has always been about… well “windows.” I remember being amazed at Windows 3.1 because there was a graphical alternative to DOS, and again with (my beloved) Windows 2000 when the customization and speed of their graphical layout was king.

The application windows in Vista do have a rather beautiful - if imperfect - system of organization and transition. They fade in and out, pop up as previews when you mouse over the task bar, and scroll in 3D when you press Window+Tab. I have faith that after Service Pack One (see the video) is released and they solve the USB issues, we’ll have a fun and aesthetically advanced OS in Vista.