A lot of folks tell me that they probably won’t upgrade to Windows Vista; that they like to wait until the first service pack comes out.  I hear this phrase even from people who haven’t a clue what a service pack is.  This tells me that this is advice given them from someone who knows a bit more about computers than they do.  And it also tells me that what they really want is trouble-free computing.

I have been running Windows Vista for a few months now and I have been nearly 100% trouble free.  Yes, nearly, but not quite.  Every once in a while I’ll have a message window pop up that tells me that some Windows service has stopped functioning, and I click okay.   Then I wait for the computer to act up because of this – but it never does!  No blue screens, no sluggishness, no programs fail to launch.

Admittedly, I’m not one to have a lot of computer problems.  I use all mainstream software that I trust, I stay away from even mainstream software that I do not trust.  I don’t do file sharing (outside of my local home network), I don’t play video games, I built my own computer from high quality parts, and I keep my security software up to date.  I use my computer more as a production machine than an entertainment machine, though I do some of that too. 

Even so, my computer setup is not simple.  I’m on a home network, I synchronize a Pocket PC with my desktop, I have multiple printers, and I have a hard drive setup such that 2 drives mirror one another, protecting me from the possibility of a single drive crash. 

The bottom line here is that Vista has been rock solid stable and fast!  Of course I built my machine with Vista in mind.  Personally, there are few machines that I would upgrade to Vista.  Most people will and should wait until they buy a new machine that is designed for Windows Vista and comes with it pre-loaded.  Any new machine from this point forward should have Vista on it, unless you specify you want XP instead, or it is older stock being sold off (at reduced prices, I would hope). 

Let me tell you, though, what I think you will love the most about Windows Vista. If you’ve had a computer for awhile now, which will be most of you reading this, you’ve no doubt accumulated many personal files; Word documents, photos, music, etc. Some of you may be very organized and have put your files into multiple folders. You may have so many folders that now you don’t remember what folder you put a specific file or photo in! That is certainly my situation.  If this describes you, you are in for a real treat!

Windows Vista indexes all user files, including individual email files. It indexes the content of these files, not just the titles. You will find a search box in all operating system Windows, such as Computer, Documents, Control Panel. There’s a search box right on the Start Menu even. Let’s say you have a document and you can’t recall the title or where you put it, but you know that it began with “It was a rainy day.” You would type that phrase in the search box, and Vista would have located the document by the time you finished typing the phrase. Even better, let’s say you weren’t sure if it was a Word document or it was in an email. Vista wouldn’t care; it would find it with equal ease in both cases.

Have you ever wanted to somehow attach a comment to a file? You can do that in Vista. You can give files (and that includes photos, music or any other type of file), key words, tags and even ratings. You can sort files by any file attribute (such as name, date, size, type, rating, keyword, etc.), filter them by any attribute, stack them too. It’s all about you being able to access your data instantly, in any way you want it. You don’t really even need all those folders anymore. You can even search for a program you want to run! (Where did that defragmenter go? I know it’s here somewhere!)

This is my favorite feature of Vista, the one that saves me the most time and frustration. I should also mention, though, that Vista is pretty. Some of you old-time computer users scoff at such things, calling it eye candy. Well if it is, my eyes have a sweet tooth! I spend hours each day in front of either my own computer or someone else’s. Why shouldn’t what I see be aesthetically pleasing? Vista is very visually appealing, and the combination of the new Office 2007 programs with Vista is quite stunning.

There are other things you’ll love about Vista; its security features, built in parental controls, its fabulous help system, its overall stability; but indexing and search are at the top of my list.