Okay, I’m about two months late to the party, but I’ve only just started playing with Vista, so I’ve not had a chance to get sick and tired of it yet.

Initially, I was dead set against the new Windows operating system — to the point where I was considering moving to a Linux distro or even (whisper it) a Mac. However, after lots of soul-searching and deliberation, I bought a laptop with Vista pre-loaded and accepted my fate.

And, er, I actually quite like it. Vista’s very, very pretty. That’s the first thing I noticed, and kept noticing. I’m running Home Premium, so Aeroglass is in full effect. Everything just looks a lot smarter, from the Start menu to the buttons on all the windows to the folders where documents are stored. Even the built-in Windows games are shinier; it seems a lot of those six years were spent working on the games, because as well as the standard Minesweeper and Solitaire, there’s Chess Titans, Purble Place, and the highly addictive Inkball. The card games all look a lot snappier, as does Minesweeper. It’s all completely unnecessary, but I’ve already admitted I’m a bit of a magpie, so I’m enjoying it.

The search function in Vista is blindingly fast, and I like the idea of tagging photos and rating files to make them easier to find. Everything I’ve tried to do so far has just worked, and Windows Defender isn’t being too obnoxious either. It all seems fairly intuitive; not much has really changed from XP, which is probably a good reason for most people not to bother till there’ve been a couple of Service Packs and more third party apps are offering Vista support, but I can’t say that I have any regrets about moving to Vista.

There’s something a bit ominous about the fact that I don’t have any complaints… yet.

I’ve just handed over money for a laptop. I won’t be able to actually lay hands on the thing till Sunday — and I only belatedly realised it’ll be April Fool’s Day, so there will undoubtedly be something hilariously wrong with it — so in the meantime I’ll just be stewing in anticipation.

There’s one thing about the soon-to-be-mine computer that both excites and worries me, though. While the Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of RAM are thrillingly up to date when compared with my current set-up, the problem with buying a new computer nowadays is that they tend to come preloaded with Windows Vista.

Happily, I’ll be running Home Premium, rather than the cheaper Home Basic, so it shouldn’t be an entirely unpleasant experience. It might even be kind of fun; after all, even Micro Mart’s own damning cover feature on 2007’s most pointless upgrade concluded that if it were cheaper and worked with more hardware, Vista would be quite a good thing.

And since Simon’s even gone and bought a PlayStation 3, at least I won’t be alone in the using-technology-generally-not-considered-to-be-worth-the-asking-price camp.

Chalk this one up to “cautious optimism” for now, then