Round 3: Reliability
With so much attention being paid to the more visible changes in Vista – UAC, Aero, the revised Explorer GUI – the tweaks Microsoft made under the hood have gotten little press. To be sure, Microsoft did some retrofitting with Vista. Heap management has improved. The power management subsystems have been completely rewritten. I/O tasks can be configured to run at a low priority, and they can even be canceled in certain situations, improving the user experience during background service processing, network timeouts, and so on.

There's no question this is all good stuff. However, from a practical standpoint, the changes are far from earthshaking. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to point out examples of their impact during day-to-day operation. The lone exception: low-priority I/O, which is helpful during initial OS startup because Vista loads so many more background services than Windows XP. In other words, Microsoft needed something to offset all of that additional startup processing. If Vista boots before you return with your cup of coffee, you have I/O prioritization to thank.

As for overall stability, most customers will agree that – barring a buggy driver or virus infection – Windows XP has been rock stable since Service Pack 2 was released nearly four years ago. And with Service Pack 3 arriving any day now (sporting even more robustness and improved performance), the Vista reliability message becomes an even harder sell.

Decision: There is little or no clamor in the Windows XP community for better stability or reliability. Windows XP is a mature, stable OS with a well-known list of weaknesses and corresponding work-arounds. On paper, Vista brings a better foundation, but in practice, it addresses problems that most customers weren't aware even existed, let alone needed fixing.

Round 1: Security
Round 2: Manageability
Round 3: Reliability
Round 4: Usability
Round 5: Performance
Round 6: Hardware compatibility
Round 7: Microsoft software compatibility
Round 8: Third-party software compatibility
Round 9: Developer tools support
Round 10: Future-proofing