I hate updating software.  Many years of painful upgrade experiences have taught me not to upgrade a piece of software unless it’s horribly broken or lacks the ability to get anything done.

That’s why I was dreadfully, terribly afraid of upgrading from Windows XP to Vista on my home desktop.  Sure I’ve been running Vista since summer 2007 at work, but I don’t do much other than software development on my work PC.

Knowing full well that a clean install is the only safe way to go and that Windows always needs more RAM, I picked up a new hard drive and an extra gigabyte of RAM (memory sure is cheap these days!)  It also doesn’t help that I was running an original Windows XP Pro install from late 2001 (which has gone through half a dozen hardware upgrades on the same install).  It was tired and in need of a clean slate.

The install was remarkably, stunningly painless.  There were all sorts of things that just worked without the installer wizard having to ask me dumb questions.  It was so smooth — even to the point that it auto-capitalized the registration key while I was typing so I didn’t have to worry about whether I had caps lock on.

I almost wish I had something bad to say, but nothing went wrong and everything worked.  This is nothing like setting up an NT 4.0 system, which had a way of running differently every time you installed it on the exact same hardware configuration.

The folks who fear Vista, think it’s broken or too evil to use:  They’re idiots.  It works, and it works better than any Microsoft OS yet.  If you have the hardware to run it you probably ought to.  Now that it’s SP1 and most software developers have worked out their compatibility glitches it’s mature enough to use regularly.

My only complaints:  Folder views defaulting to music (it’s a folder full of DLLs you idiot, show me the size, date, and version — not artist, album, and rating!); kind of annoying navigating in Windows Explorer (it’s an extra click or two to get where I’m going); the folks at Winamp still haven’t gotten their act together for Vista (crash, crash, crash!)