Microsoft has a new ad campaign showing various life experiences where the participants says "wow" to themselves and then at the end it equate Windows Vista 3D windows display as something to say "wow" about. I like the ad. It is very well done. It got my attention, however, Windows Vista does not wow me.
I stopped by Best Buy the other night and checked out the numerous notebooks on display running Vista. It is very shiny and glossy, but not necessarily any more intuitive. I was looking at Sony Vaio with a built in camera. I was looking for a way to see the results of the camera. At first I went to Control Panel thinking I would find a camera settings applet there to let me play with the adjustments and see a preview. I was wrong. I had to scroll through a long list of applications on the Programs menu to find the Vaio video camera program.
Being a long time Linux and Mac users, virtual screens and transparent windows have been around for a while. 3D windows displays have been available in third party applications, but I never found them any more useful than the Alt+Tab command or Apple's Expose feature. I do not think many other people will find it much more useful either, especially when you consider you need at least a gigabyte of RAM and a separate video adapter. Apparently the integrated Intel video chipsets will not cut it with the Aero interface. 128 MB of video memory is the recommended minimum.
A gig of memory recently use to be considered luxurious and now it is the recommended minimum. Actually, I am old enough to remember when Bill Gates said that we would never need more than 640 KB. My current cell phone has 10x more memory than that. Vista is like a pig with lipstick.
Then consider the confusing multiple packages: Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, Business and Enterprise. Then there are 64-bit versions of those. There is the upgrade price and then the full price. Considering the hardware requirements, I would would wait until purchasing a new computer that comes with Vista. However, personally I would wait for the new Mac OS X Leopard.