What You Need To Know About Vista Upgrades

A piece from PC Magazine about how to get an upgrade to Windows Vista if you buy a new computer from now on. 

Link to What You Need To Know About Vista Upgrades

So, after all the back and forth about release dates, it looks pretty certain that Vista will not actually be available till next year. For those of you who have been wondering about whether to get a new computer now or wait until Vista comes out, this might help a wee bit. The article tells you about how you can get a free upgrade to Vista for your new hardware, when Vista does ship.

This article is not about whether you should upgrade to Vista. Nor is it about how to do the actual upgrade when it arrives.

I'm not so sure about the wisdom of  buying a machine now and then do an OS upgrade in 3-4 months. For somebody who rarely customises anything or installs more than the basic suite of programs, this might be ok. But then that person is also not likely to care about upgrading to Vista either. For those of us who do like to use cutting edge tools, many of us do a lot of optimising of our computing environment. Software settings, tweaks, shortcuts etc.

Now most of those should not be affected by an OS upgrade. Sadly, what I have found in the past is that much more is affected than I would like and therefore, after an OS change, I often have to reinstall and re-customise. At 3-4 months of owning a device, I usually have it tweaked to the point where it is singing along nicely. I'm not yet running into the challenge where I have DLL conflicts, programs fighting with each other and stuff like that. So...if it's working well at that point, why fix it?

I think I'll wait. The options suggested in the article is helpful for those people who have to get a new machine (hard drive dying, changing jobs etc)...but otherwise, I would wait.