Review by William Farrell

I was really looking forward to Vista. I ran out and got my copy as soon as it hit shelves. Two weeks later, I uninstalled it. I don’t know when, or even if, I will reinstall it. Here’s why:nn1) Game support - BEFORE you buy Vista, make sure your favorite game has a Vista patch, because it most likely won’t work otherwise. Check online to ensure that they are compatible, because many just aren’t.

2) Immature drivers - in point 3 below, you’ll see that Vista flat out does not support many hardware devices. Even for those that it does, the drivers are so new, that the device (like my GeForce 7900GT) actually run SLOWER in Vista than XP.

3) Hardware support - most vendors are NOT releasing Vista drivers, to force people to buy new hardware. For instance, my scanner (Epson) has no vista compatible driver (I tried the XP driver), and neither does my camera. BEFORE you buy Vista, check to see that your hardware is supported!nn4) Copy protection. Like to copy a DVD so you can watch it whenever you want? Forget it! It WILL NOT happen in Vista, M$ made sure of that. Same thing with programs like TuneBite that let you convert WMA songs into MP3s.

5) Antivirus. Vista’s security it, well, more secure than XP. But the antivirus applications compatible with it are VERY lacking at this point. And there are already viruses (virii?) out for Vista, so you DO need it.

6) Firefox - many sites do not work under Firefox with Vista. And some extensions do not work. I can’t help but think this might be intentional.