Round 4: Usability
Vista Aero: Either you love it or you hate it. If you're an Aero hater, you can disable much of the slickness via the Control Panel, but you can't get rid of it entirely. That's because the changes Aero brings are more than superficial. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided to move things around. Gone is the familiar "up a level" button in Explorer. In its place is a foreign-looking – and infinitely more powerful – breadcrumbs feature in the Address Bar. Other options have been uprooted and scattered across myriad task-specific, pseudo-control panels (System Properties, Security Center, Mobility Center, and more).

Veteran XP users will need some time to adjust. Some will require retraining, especially with regard to UAC and its never-ending parade of confirmation dialogs. Likewise with the Search mechanism, which, though pervasive (almost every Explorer window or dialog has a Search field), can quickly lead the user down the rabbit hole of nested results with no clear route back to the beginning. And some new features, such as the Windows Backup Utility, so thoroughly insulate users from the underlying process that they don't know until it's too late that their data wasn't really backed up at all -- something I found out the hard way early on.

Add to this the fact that many of Vista's enhancements can be replicated on XP (such as Windows Desktop Search), and you can't help but wonder: Did the Windows UI really need such a radical overhaul? After all, an entire generation of our newest workers was raised on the Windows 9x Explorer motif which, with a few exceptions, has remained stable for more than a decade. Vista's UI is definitely different. However, the jury's still out on whether it's better.

Decision: Change, for change's sake, is never a good idea. And while you can understand Microsoft's desire to refresh the Windows UI (all those Mac OS X screen shots look so much prettier than XP), Vista's designers seem to have cut off their nose to spite their face. Regardless, the usability "improvements" in Vista are unlikely to make IT's list of compelling reasons to move away from XP anytime soon.

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