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Reasons to buy Windows Vista: number, er, one
I'm a fairly happy Windows XP user. I use Windows XP Pro on both my work and home computers, and I have a Windows XP Media Center Edition box that hums away under my television storinng hundreds of episodes of The Daily Show and The Simpsons that I might, eventually, get around to watching. Once XP has been stripped of its silly blue and green skin and turned into XP Classic (instructions here) it does pretty much everything I want to do - that is, run Firefox, Outlook, Word and Photoshop. I tried installing Vista alongside XP on my home computer, but after an entertaining half hour watching it fail to recognise my sound card and wireless network adapter I deleted the partition and went back to XP (take that, wide-framed loom).
The other day, though, in an astounding moment of non-Luddism, I traded in my rather wonderful but entirely film-based Nikon F80 for a newer, smaller, and 100% more digital D40. This means that, rather than wrangling with insanely slow and annoying film scanners and storing a stupid amount of Fuji Provia film in the fridge where I could be storing fine cheeses, I can shoot digitally in RAW mode. And, for RAW photography, XP is some way behind Vista.
There are many ways to edit and organise RAW files in XP, but they require third-party software. I like Adobe's Lightroom and Photoshop, but both are expensive (leaving less money for, amongst other things, cheese in the fridge). In Windows Vista, though, you can add plugins (here's Nikon's) that allow the operating system to thumbnail RAW images just like any other image format. This doesn't mean that you can edit them - you'll still need a decent image editor to adjust the white balance, exposure etc - but it does allow you to find images without starting up cataloguing software or simply flick through the contents of a memory card to see which shots came out right. An excellent idea.
So - finally, there's one new feature in Windows Vista that makes me actually want to buy a copy. One feature does not a £105 upgrade make, but it's a start.
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