Just A Few Thoughts on Windows Vista

As, I said in my initial post, I'm not the world's biggest technophile...I just know what works for me. That being said, I'd like to offer my humble opinions on Windows Vista.
I used Windows XP Home edition on my former roommate's system for three years, and I thought (and still do) that XP is a great, solid OS...I mean, it's been around for a few years now, and it's had eons (in tech terms) to mature and develop into a very useful system. I definitely became familiar with it, got used to it, and even became infatuated with the system sounds (even the "critical stop" alert that most people I know find too jarring and loud).
When I bought my own Toshiba Satellite laptop one year ago, it was after much consideration on usage, price, and hardware specs...but one of the most agonizing was: Should I go with XP or Vista? I had heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who had updated from XP to Vista, and I was concerned, too. I kept hearing about crashes, and incompatibilities, and thought, it couldn't be that bad, could it? What made the decision for me was pricing and availability. At the same time I was doing my comparison shopping, I noticed a sudden price jump for systems with XP, while pre-loaded Vista was (not surprisingly) priced lower and were immediately more prevalent. Though, even now, I think it's still possible to get a brand new computer loaded with Windows XP, but they're scarce.
Back to now. After a full year of using Windows Vista Home Premium on a 200GB HD, 1GB RAM, for lots of web browsing, typical communications, and average use...not to mention lots of system updates (including Service Pack 1) that have kept anything icky from happening, I am quite happy with it.
Having said that, here's the caveat: I've given many people I know this advice, based on my experience tempered with reading loads of articles/blogs from people who know way more than I do. If you are getting all new hardware, I can't see the need to be afraid of Vista. It's far easier to buy a new system with Vista, and XP's support is going to be yanked soon, anyway. When it's pre-loaded, unless you have too many needs that it can't fill, just go with the Vista. HOWEVER (and I'm still saying this), if you don't find yourself severely limited with your maturing Windows XP, stay with it. I'm pretty sure a lot of current XP users will be fine skipping Vista altogether, since Microsoft is cooking up "Windows 7" for release in another year or two. I've actually begun to wonder if me and the other Vista users are on the "transition" system between two solid OS's.
As an end note, a quick word about the system sounds in XP and Vista. A little thing, I know, but sometimes it's the little things that matter. I never quite got used to the drastic change in the sounds that Vista has. On my Toshiba laptop, even with Harman Kardon speakers, some of the sounds were barely audible, and not exceptionally distinctive (except the "system start" sound). I looked everywhere for the wav. files of the Windows XP sounds, found them, snagged them, and created a theme in the settings. They never worked properly, so I restored the Vista default sounds and reassigned the XP sounds to my Yahoo Messenger alerts. That works out better, because I get to hear them more often.

Coming Soon: I'll talk about my current tryout of Mozilla Firefox version 3, after being a Windows Internet Explorer user for ages...and my continuing search for (my) perfect PDA/smartphone.