Last night, I steeled myself and just did it: I upgraded my computer to Windows Vista.

I backed up my critical files, pried open the Rubik’s Cube of a box in which my upgrade DVD was located, and popped that DVD in the drive. About an hour and a half later, during which time the software did almost all the work by itself, I was up and running.

I chose the upgrade installation instead of the clean install path, after reading that the upgrade installation worked better than it had in past Windows versions. I also found this to be the case.

The problems were pleasingly few:

–Vista advised me to uninstall Nero Burning Rom, which was fine because I have many alternatives. I had to uninstall and reinstall my antivirus and anti-spyware programs. It doesn’t like my secure, encrypted drive software (no big deal — I’ll switch programs and I had all of those files backed up). I’m sure I’ll find a few other programs that will puke on Vista.

–The constant security nags are annoying — but they can be eliminated when I get around to tweaking things. The ‘off’ selection doesn’t shut down your computer — it puts it into sleep mode (but that’s configurable as well). Instead of finding and installing video drivers for my NVidia card, Vista installed a generic VGA driver and turned off Aero by default (again, quickly fixed).

–There were a few minor issues with locating my videos and music. My iTunes installation was completely hosed — but again, that should be fixed with a reinstall (but it’s something for you people who have DRM-protected iTunes files to think about).

That sounds like a lot, but an operating system upgrade can be a traumatic thing, and I found this to actually be fairly easy. I have no real complaints.

I’ve still got some tweaking to do but here are my first impressions:

–It’s visually attractive.
–Windows Media Player is better in Vista than XP.
–I like the widgets and plan to implement them in the next few days.
–The constant hard drive grind is annoying, but I’m fairly sure it’s because my drive is still being indexed for the much-improved Vista desktop search functions. Once that gets done, I would expect things will get better.
–My Athlon 64×2 4000/2 gigs of memory/NVidia 8600GT setup works just fine with Vista.
–I’m not really noticing any speed reductions that others have complained about, but I’m also not much of a gamer.
–Aero is particularly cool if you have a tendency to open up a lot of programs at once (I don’t).

But here’s the other thing: So far, I don’t see any particular advantage in upgrading to Vista. I mostly just did it because I’m a hobbyist who likes to fiddle with my computer for grins. It’d be fine in a new computer, and the graphic functions and widgets are kind of fun, but it’s hard for me to make a legitimate cost-vs.-benefits argument for Vista right now. And a system upgrade is always fraught with imminent peril.