I'm afraid of vista
 

and I am starting to think about what I am going to buy later on this year in the way of a new computer.

So far, everything I've heard about vista has been horrible. So this is causing me to pause and think maybe I should electronically change my computer orientation and go with a mac?

I'm not a complete idiot, but I have never worked on an Apple PC. I know there is plenty of software for me with regard to podcasting and I am sure I can adapt.

I have LOADS of files and documents on my PC and I don't want to lose them or have to fight to convert them to an mac-friendly format. Is this something I should even be worrying over?

This won't be happening for a while, but with a PC that is almost 7 years old, it's time to start thinking about a new baby.

Everyone should have a healthy fear of a 1st generation Microsoft OS.

Get a Mac. They dual boot now and you can run Windows from it.

That said, my friend has been running Vista for awhile and has had no issues with it.

What she said.

Not only can you boot Windows on a mac, but you can even run it simultaneously using an application called Parallels (and it's native, not an emulation).

Plus, I'll bet that most of your files will open in the os x environment without needing to open windows at all.

So far, the only people I've seen having issues with Vista are the people who are down in the nitty gritty of the operating system. Regular users don't seem to be having much issue beyond the new learning curve of any operating system (which you'd have anyway with a Mac).

I haven't used it much myself yet, so I could be wrong.

But if you're buying it later this year, I'd just assume on spending X amount of money and then wait and see how it shakes out by the time you get around to it.

What formats do you currently have that you're worried about? Most of the big ones shouldn't be a problem but individual proprietary formats could be a problem. The primary reason Lani keeps her Mac going (she switched last year from 20 years of Macs to a PC) is because of some things that just can't easily be moved over.

The transition to Vista isn't as scary as you've heard. As Alex said, unless you're really pushing its limits and/or getting into some advanced features, it's not an issue.

If you have any software over a year old - it may not run. Best to find out before hand or have the $$$ to replace it.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed. My new laptop arrives tomorrow and I had no choice in the matter. I was told that Dell only offers Vista on their new laptops.

I would have preferred XP.

I've heard that a lot of software isn't working on Vista...XP had the same issue when it came out. Biggest program I can think of is iTunes, though Apple said they will release a new version which makes it compatible in the next few weeks.

I toyed with the idea of putting Vista on my Mac, but I don't really see a reason to. It doesn't offer any real improvments that I've been able to see over some flashy new graphics, and I've heard that it is really unreliable and buggy. If you decide not to go with a Mac, I would wait until Vista SP1 or SP2 came out. They will fix a lot of the bugs.

I'd like to hear exactly WHO is saying that Vista is really unreliable and buggy.
I've been running it since before RC1, and the only really bad experience has been Nvidia's graphics driver support.

As for program compatibility, Vista has a lot of EASY to use ways to run older software - I've even been able to run a few old games in Vista that I couldn't run in XP without some serious trickery/voodoo/blood sacrifice.

If you spend some time on Digg and similar sites, you will find plenty of people having problems with their graphics drivers, to the extent that anything OpenGL on a lot of systems just blue screens.

Not to mention the insane memory requirements of Vista. I couldn't even use the beta on my Dell with 512 MB of RAM since it was so slow.

I think the biggest software incompatibility problems I've heard are DivX (won't even install), AVG Anti-Virus, ZoneAlarm, WS-FTP, Second Life, Adobe Premier, Winamp, WinRAR, Paint Shop Pro, and iTunes.