Or so we hope.

Learning something new is never easy but a wrench is thrown in when that something new has quirks.

I’m not an expert in computer technology but from my experience, Vista was a bit of a disaster. We held back upgrading our PCs at home and hubby only migrated over when he had to (for work purposes). At the office, we have 3 PCs running Vista and for the most part, they work great. It’s the compatibility that sucks the big one. My biggest issue at the office is the fact that previous versions of Outlook don’t work correctly which means for at least one computer in the office, we had to unload $300 for a copy of Office 2007.

The biggest complaints I’ve heard are that it’s slow and for those used to previous versions of Windows, hard to get used to. I can see that – the menus are different, settings are located in different places and even I’m still getting used to a few of the changes. There are a couple of nice upgrades – notably the Media Center software which allows you to connect all of your Microsoft devices together (PC, Xbox and Zune). Did the Vista release bomb? I don’t think so but I’m pretty sure the transition wasn’t as smooth as Microsoft would have liked.

So what do the geniuses at Microsoft do? They start working on a new release. I haven’t been following this too closely but Windows 7 is coming and according to Lifehacker, it’s coming very soon: by midyear 2009 and pre-bundled with PCs for the 2009 holiday shoppers.

Again, I haven’t been tracking the updates and of all I’ve seen, the coolest is the Apple-like dock menu.

I’m actually looking forward to hubby getting his hands on a test copy (being a computer tech has its perks). The thing won’t run on my little laptop but I’d love to see how it handles on our home/media PC.