I ran into a woman tonight at Office Depot and we were talking, and she
said that she regrets upgrading to Vista because it crashes with a lot of
her XP software.
Is this true?
I've been running Vista since RTM in November 2006, with a wide range
of software, much of which was software I had also run under Windows
XP.
My experience is that Vista has *never* crashed, and all of my older
software runs just fine, with the exception of a couple of minor
freeware utilities I had to replace.
This is like any other product. Regardless of whether you are talking
about a car, a television set, or an operating system, you can always
find people who have had good experiences with it and others who have
had bad experiences.
However, note that your woman at Office Depot apparently *upgraded* to
Vista. That suggests that she had a Windows-XP era computer. Vista
needs more powerful hardware than XP (no surprise there; almost every
new operating system needs more powerful hardware than its
predecessor), and many people who upgrade have inadequate hardware to
adequately support Vista, and therefore find that it runs poorly.
I've been thinking of getting a new computer with Vista instead of XP, but
now I'm rethinking that.
Your choice of course. My recommendation is to get Vista (but make
sure you get adequate hardware; in particular be sure to get 2GB of
RAM). It makes no sense to get a new computer with yesterday's
operating system; sooner or later you will want to run a new piece of
hardware or software that only runs under Vista, and you will end up
upgrading anyway. If you were asking whether to upgrade from XP, my
advice to most people is that there's no rush, and to be sure you need
to do so; but with a new computer, I recommend Vista.
