I am sure that you have watched the different advertisements that Mac has put out in the past 90 days. You know, the one that shows Windows Vista as the user with an identity crisis that is continually self evaluating him self in the eyes of Mac. That commercial drives me nuts, and to be completely honest, I am surprised that Microsoft hasn't come back with a vengence.
Now I may be a part of a narrow group that likes Vista. I remember all of the hullabaloo when Windows 95 came out, and Mac users complaining that Windows 95 was a poor knockoff of their beloved OS. I currently support three server technologies, Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the one that I have the most problems in the enterprise is my Mac server and clients. Windows and Linux have their own little quirks, and even the OS developers do not claim to make their operating system interoperability to be flawless. Mac on the other hand has made claims that their OS will work with multiple operating systems flawlessly, and since it's built on a Linux platform, cross compatibility is simple.
Ok, I can buy that with basic items. You can mount and launch OS independent applications, however, when you need to use resources from a MAC, good luck. Sure, don't get me wrong, all of the necessary items can be done, however, they're not for the layman becuase they require consistent tweaking and monitoring to ensure enterprise level benchmarks.
Now, on the Vista front, you need to take a momey and decide what you want to used Windows for. If you're interested in running nothing but new applications and hardware, then Vista is your best XP SP2 or SP3. Not only is xp forward and backward compatible, it's compatibility mode is more robust than Vista is, and theres already support sites with researched answers to fix your issues. Vista is slowly coming to its own, and by the time xp is fully phased out later this year, Vista should have released sp2 with the necessary fixes to run all of the latest XP applications, which will add the necessary compatibility modules to run other legacy business applications, such as Great Plains and the like.
Take your time and give Vista another chance, and if you're lucky, buy that mac and use them for what they were intended for: Microsoft Business and Gaming, Macintosh for Graphics and Other media applications.
