Ok.. I can't believe I'm doing this.. I really can't.  But I'm actually going to find myself in the bizarre position of defending a Windows operating system.. lol..

First, a bit of background.. I'm not windows fan.  I haven't been since version 3.1 - in fact I was tossed off the widespread beta team along with a dozen other folks because we kept annoying microsoft by reporting bugs.  That of course is what we thought our job as beta testers should be, apparently Microsoft had other ideas.

So believe me I'm not one who would normally come to the defense of Windows, in fact the only reason I still run Windows at all is for two main reasons, I do runs some Windows apps that Linux Wine simply cannot handle, and my wife and children are unaccustomed to Linux and have no desire to switch over.

So I run a small network here at home, with both Linux and Windows machines.   I had not intention of upgrading to Vista myself, in fact I generally wait quite some time before upgrading any version of Windows simply because Microsoft is notorious for releasing new versions that should have been considered beta code rather than finshed production code.

So I wasn't planning on switching to Vista, but two things happened within days of one another to change my mind.  First a buddy of mine who's a longtime linux geek bought a brand new system that came bundled with a Windows Vista DVD.  Naturally he had no use for it and didn't want anything to do with it, he's a Linux only kinda guy.  So he gave it to me, knowing that I work in the IT field and am always looking for stuff like this to experiment with.

The second event was my daughter downloading a file off the internet and installing it, turns out it was actually a particularly nasty virus/trojan called wintems.exe.   Well at any rate sine I already had a full backup and was curious,  I installed Vista on my machine.

I was impressed by the fact that it found all of my hardware and made use of it, something XP could not do without a lot of external drivers being downloaded and installed.  The new visual effects I must admit are a bit much for my tastes, but on the whole the OS has been very solid and very stable on my system.

Unlike most of Microsoft's previous releases, one thing you cannot call Vista is "premature', it is in fact an update they've been working on for nearly 5 years now and is based off there 2003 server code.  Now, that having been said, Vista is not for all machines or for all people.  It does not run well on anything that doesn't meet or in fact exceed there minimum system requirements and if you have some very oddball hardware this might give Vista the fits.

However in my case it seemed to work well with my hardware and actually Poser has been a lot more stable and a lot faster under it than it was under Windows XP.

Now, in reponse to the Windows XP 64, I do have a machine with a 64 bit processor, however truth be told I haven't really been to concerned about upgrading to a 64 bit OS, not yet at any rate.  The reason is that most of the apps I run, in fact pretty much all of them, are still 32 bit apps, and as such a 64 bit OS really wouldn't give me too many advantages.  

Some of the newer apps out there are being coded for 64 - and when it becomes necessary I will probably upgrade my OS to accomodate them, but for the time being paying extra for a 64 bit OS really didn't make much sense for my application, since none of the apps I have could take advantage of it anyway.

So take it for what it's worth folks, I'm no microsoft fan nor am I a Vista cheerleader by any stretch of the imagination, but thus far I must admit Vista has been more stable and more usable on my machine than XP.  In the final analysis though I suppose everyone has to decide for themselves what the best OS is for there application.

Stepdad