By Jin Nan Goto

On June 30, 2008 Microsoft ended retail sales of the venerable Windows XP.  There are still loopholes where  people are still able to get computers with XP.  Downgrades, for instance.  The question is, when you buy a new computer what Operating System should it run XP or Vista.  The truth is that they both can do many of the same things equally well and there is no pressing reason to upgrade existing machines.  Still When the time comes to buy a new computer, here are 3 reasons why Vista is a better buy.

Reason 1. Vista is more secure than XP

UAC (user account control) is a misunderstood aspect of Vista.  The user is generally the weakest link in a computers security.  UAC limits what the user can do to modify the system and will prompt them for a password if a change to the system needs to be made.  Microsoft’s competitors Apple OS X both have similar features.  Although An argument can be made that Vista’s implementation is too strict.  While The pop-ups of UAC are annoying, they protect the users from themselves and Vista is more secure because of it.

There are other smaller security features in Vista that are worth mentioning.  For users of Vista Business and Ultimate, there is bitlocker drive encryption to protect your data.  There is also better protection of memory such as ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) which randomizes the position of windows files to protect against buffer overflows.

Reason 2. Better Hardware Support

When Vista was released it was plagued by incompatibilities, both hardware and software.  For some of the incompatible software and hardware, their vendors have not yet (and likely never will) released fixes.  This is especially true for older hardware and software.  However many of the problems with incompatibility have been fixed and all recent hardware supports Vista.  Generally most hardware and software should work with Vista and will continue to support Vista in the future.  A year and a half after Vista’s release and compatibility is where it should be.  Here is a Microsoft website with compatibility information about Vista.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/

There is an exception, if you have mission critical device or software that you know is not compatible with Vista then of course XP is the way to go.  If the VPN client that you rely on to communicate with your office does not run on Vista then you need to stay with XP

Reason 3. Vista is more convenient

I have had Vista since it was released and I have never had to run the disk defragmenter.  Vista automatically schedules the defragmenter to run every week.  That is just plain convenient  because I won’t have to deal with a sluggish computer if I forget to defrag.

Networking in Vista is also significantly improved.  It is much easier and simpler to set up tasks like printer sharing in Vista than it was in XP.

Then there is Vista’s instant search box which is built into the start menu.  Just type the first few letters of the file or program and it finds it for you.  Every time I use a computer running XP I always miss the feature a lot.