Windows Vista is a new tech toy, and I like new tech toys, so I’ve been debating over when I’m going to upgrade. My home machine should have plenty of muscle: A dual-core processor, two gigs of memory, a quarter-terabyte hard drive with lots of free space, a relatively new video card with 250 megs on-board memory, and so on.

But installing a new OS is fraught with imminent peril, and I’ve got some persnickety pieces of hardware (including a draft-N wireless card), so I’ve wondered about whether this is such a good idea. No problem: Microsoft has written some software it’s titled ‘Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor,’ that is supposed to probe my system and let me know of any potential pitfalls it finds.

So: Yesterday, I run the adviser. It promptly crashes. I unload the antivirus and anti-spyware programs. It still crashes. I take out the media server software running in the background. The crashing continues.

If my computer won’t even run the adviser, how am I supposed to feel about the software? Insecure, that’s how. I’m going to wait a while before I upgrade.