Appar­ently I’m not the only one think­ing this way about Vista. Though it looks awful pretty, and if I bought a PC with it installed I’d prob­a­bly have a hard time con­vinc­ing myself to buy another XP license just so I didn’t have to use Vista for a few months! On the flip side, I would def­i­nitely con­sider hold­ing off a hard­ware pur­chase that included a Vista license for a few more months, know­ing a Ser­vice Pack is imminent.

Of course, if they’d got it right from the start, I’d be run­ning Vista already… as it stands, I’m not too likely to drop $200 on some­thing that runs slower than XP, sup­ports less hard­ware, has arguably-worse power man­age­ment, and makes the occa­sion­ally excru­ci­at­ing UI mis­take (most notable is the auto­matic replace­ment of the “sleep” but­ton with “install updates and shut­down” where updates are avail­able). Really, the main rea­son I’d switch is to have con­sis­tent UI between Office 2007 and the rest of the sys­tem (instead of the presently absurd Vista-ish (but not actu­ally Vista) UI avail­able on XP), newer hard­ware (inso­far as XP isn’t avail­able), and a paid-for upgrade path… I’d rather fork out my money now and trust that another 3 ser­vice packs are com­ing, rather than pay full price for an OS and then pay full price again, and again. I acknowl­edge this is par­tially a psy­cho­log­i­cal thing stem­ming from my oppo­si­tion for pay­ing for point-releases, but even so… many of the alleged ‘upgrades’ in OS X are thor­oughly trivial.