At the CES show in Las Vegas, I was able to catch a peek of the new Microsoft Vista operating system. From what I saw, you can stop holding your breathe.

The big selling point was “convergence” , allowing home users to easily upload pictures and videos from cameras and camcorders. If you are reading this post, most likely you have never had trouble doing this. Microsoft is taking a cue from the Department of Education and is “dumbing down” the operating system. Rather than fixing and improving XP, they have just saddled the OS with most bug prone features.

When I asked the sales rep what Vista’s offered in terms of image handling that Google’s FREE Picase didnt already offer, I was shown a nifty way to change the size of the thumbnails……whoohoo. The rep conceded that Picasa was an excellent piece of software but was not integrated into the OS. (Is this a bad thing??) Another feature they touted was “desktop search”, again something I do for FREE courtesy of Google’s Desktop Search

Overall, unless Microsoft unveils some earth shattering features, don’t waste a moment thinking about upgrading. Wait until you need to buy a new PC and get it preinstalled. Or even better yet, try Linux.