It's kind of hard to believe that one year has gone by since the release of Windows Vista.  It seems like all the hype was just yesterday, but even thought the release is far behind us, that certainly hasn't stopped people from talking about it.  Being that Vista is one year old, I wanted to give my take on how my Vista experience has been throughout the past year.

Vista and I had a rough start to be honest.  I was first using Vista as a dual-boot with XP, mainly because my printer would not work with Vista and a few other minor compatibility issues.  After a couple of months I was pleased that Dell updated my printer drivers to work with Vista.  Unfortunately at that time, my PC decided it didn't like me anymore and the motherboard went its separate way, so I had to build a new PC from scratch.  That seemed like a good time to install Vista Ultimate and start fresh again.

I really didn't like working with Vista much at first.  Looking back now I think it was more of a dislike of not working with XP.  However, I quickly picked up on the changes in Vista and eventually began to enjoy working with it.  As far as hardware goes, I built a pretty nice Core 2 Duo system with an Nvidia 7600GT video card and 2gb of RAM.  It runs beautifully and the only issues I had was the lack of an audio driver from Turtle Beach, which has since been taken care of.

One of the biggest complaints you hear about Windows Vista, is its problem with application compatibility.  The only big issue I had with this was with Photoshop CS2.  Strange enough, the problem has since worked itself out, although I have no reason why, but hey it works. 

Performance wise Vista has lived up to my expectations.  I experienced a noticeable difference  in performance between XP and Vista on the machines, but whatever you do, do not run Vista with less than 2GB of RAM.  Memory is just too cheap these days, so save yourself the trouble and get more.  The only issue I have with performance now is the awful boot time.  It just seems like it takes forever to get to a workable desktop.

Is Vista perfect?  Absolutely not, but after working with it for over a year I would now rather have Vista on my PC than XP.  I was going to list the things I don't like, but I figured we hear enough of that every other day.  The common problems with Vista are known, and hopefully many will be addressed in the upcoming SP1. 

So overall, after a year of usage I give Vista a 7 on the scale of how much I like it.  I have a huge list of things I want to see for the next version of Windows, but we will save that for another day.