Windows Vista over hyped?

I did a “review” of Windows Vista this week for my tech column in the WDL.
I use the term “review” lightly because I haven’t actually sat down and played with the new OS like I do with other products I review.
But from all I’ve read and seen other than a cool new GUI I don’t see any strong reason to upgrade from Windows XP SP2 to the new OS – especially when there’s not a single computer in our office (including my laptop) that the OS will run on.
I need a new video card to run the OS and that’s gonna be a little hard to do with a laptop.
So hope that XP support sticks around for another 10 years or so.

Here’s a run down of the system requirements:

Basic edition requirements:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
512 MB of system memory
20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
DVD-ROM drive
Audio Output
Internet access

Home Premium / Business / Ultimate requirements:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:
– WDDM Driver
– 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
– Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
– 32 bits per pixel
DVD-ROM drive
Audio Output
Internet access

As a side note we ran an ad of a local office supplier selling brand new laptops with Windows Vista installed. None of them would run Vista Ultimate. There’s something amusing about that.