The other night my mother was asking me if I was excited about Vista coming out. She wanted to know if I planned on upgrad­ing soon. When she asked what I thought about it, the first thought that came to mind was, “Who cares?”

The real­ity is Vista doesn’t bring any­thing to the table that I haven’t already been using for quite some time. Even though I don’t own one, I spend most of my time on a Mac. I manage an all Mac com­puter lab for work, we don’t even get to touch PCs. I keep a PC at home for two rea­sons: to play games and to keep my PC skills up to snuff. Tiger has all of the fea­tures that Vista is bring­ing, and more. This arti­cle from Mac User does a good job of high­light­ing that:

• 15 rea­sons to switch to Vista? How about 15 rea­sons to switch to OS X

The idea of upgrad­ing a Win­dows machine gives me a case of cold sweats. It’s just no fun. And in Vistas case, every­thing I’ve read so far points to the fact that users should be pre­pared for having to do a lot of tin­ker­ing. Most dri­vers are not yet released, and many that are are still in beta. Apple just announced that iTunes users should wait to upgrade until the next major iTunes update.

I’m not excited about the user inter­face changes in Vista. To give credit where due, I’ve heard a lot of good things about the changes (I have yet to touch Vista). The prob­lem is, I don’t want to have to “learn” another OS. I’ve spent enough time with Inter­net Explorer 7 to decide that I hate the new no tool bar. It didn’t bother me so much until I installed a devel­oper exten­sion (made by Microsoft) and then spent about 15 min­utes fig­ur­ing out how to dis­play the thing.

The other break­ing point for me is the cost. Vista is really expen­sive. I know that Apple seems to update their OS just about every year, but at least the $129 price tag is rea­son­able and they give you fea­tures to be excited about. I don’t think that any of the lower end ver­sions of Vista are going to be what I’ll want, so I’ll prob­a­bly end up with some­thing more expen­sive. Right now my employer offers $5 copies of Win­dows XP Pro for ‘working at home.’ I hope they’ll work a sim­i­lar deal for Vista eventually.

The way that I see it, the only thing that Vista really offers is Direct X 10. Unfor­tu­nately, much of the hard­ware doesn’t sup­port it yet. More impor­tantly, we’re at least year away from seeing some games that make decent use of it.

Don’t mis­take me, I will upgrade to Vista even­tu­ally. My career in com­puter sup­port requires it. And, as soon the Direct X 10 games start coming out, I won’t have a choice. But right now, I’m stay­ing put with XP. It’s proven to be ‘okay.’ At least we know it’s demons well and how to fight them.