Today I got a free copy of Windows Vista Business Edition, compliments of Microsoft themselves, for my participation in their Power Together promotion awhile back. I had to sit through three half-hour webcasts on different parts of Vista and how I can use it to do this, that, and another thing much better than I ever could before and for my patience they sent me a full free copy.

Seeing as I have it I figure I may as well try it out and get used to it. I already know there will be some issues because I’ve been keeping up on them at the various tech websites I read. In all I should expect about a 17% drop in the performance of my games, assuming they don’t crash out, and some immature drivers from nVidia among many others, but the simple truth of the matter is that I need to learn Vista one way or the other because like it or not it is the future of Windows PCs and if I’m to stay in the technical support field it helps if I am up on the latest version of the OS.

There’s also the fact that at least as few of you regulars actually seem to pay attention to my tech entries and a couple of you have written in asking for my opinion on Vista. I figure this is one way to come up with a few blog entries at least as I write about my experiences with the OS. If things are so bad that I switch back to XP before very long then that in itself will say a lot. You may recall that I played around with the beta version awhile back, but I had that set up as a secondary install and I didn’t really use it the way I would if it were my primary OS. You don’t really get to know an OS until you’ve fought to do your day to day stuff on it.

So once I’m done with this entry and getting caught up on my email, I’ll be backing up my data and doing a fresh install. My PC has been in need of a restage for awhile now anyway so I may as well experiment while I’m at it. Keep tuned to find out how things go.