I'm guessing it's a demo but the front page of Microsoft.com has an offer to test drive Vista online without changing your PC. At least then you can see what it's all about if you haven't switched to Vista yet.

This would be a nice way to check out the features, but my concerns are program compatibility and stability. I've been running XP for a long time and very rarely do I have issues, but I know other people in my line of work who have upgraded and have had nothing but problems. The demo won't show how it will work with your programs, unfortunately.

To me this is a huge red flag about Vista. They know no one likes it and that people want XP. I don't think they have ever done this before with other versions. It is about time people stood up to them and said "enough".

I for one would never willingly go to Vista.

George

Well George, one thing to remember is that there wasn't the technology to do this when XP came out. Net speeds were so much slower for one thing. So that in and of itself isn't a bad thing.

If they wanted people to like Vista more, they shouldn't put it out in computers with less than 2 gig of ram. Vista is such a resource hog, they really should have expected poor performance on machines running only 1 gig of ram. That's where half of the booing and hissing has come from.

Yes I would have to agree with you there. By putting it on machines that cannot support it you really are presenting a worst case scenario as far as how the OS runs. It's terrible even on a top quality machine, so something smaller hasn't a chance.

I do think its great to allow people to play around with the interface even if they can't use it to judge how their machine will handle it (if they have any doubts). One of the things alot of people didn't prefer about XP was the upgraded skins. Some people won't like Vista's either, and I think pretending to play nice is better than not playing at all.

I used Vista for a few hours recently on my husband's laptop and I didn't really like it, us humans, resist change for as long as we can and that's just the case now, many of us are not ready to change. I'm not.

So.. who in this thread has actually made an effort to use Vista for an extended period of time? I am considering an upgrade (which for me just means buying a new computer) to a Dual or Duo core PC and since they nearly all come with Vista now.. I need an experienced opinion.

I used it for six weeks on my primary machine before I gave up. In that time I did all that I could to make it function as it should have on my brand new machine that had good specs.