Vista is finally here

After a tumultuous 5 years in development and much feature hacking, the successor to Windows XP was finally released to consumers today.

Windows Vista promises a more secure, stable and prettier Windows than has ever gone before and seems to deliver on most of those but most reviewers seem to agree that it's not a must-have upgrade and is simply a 'warmed-over' version of XP.

Certainly there's been a lot of comparison with Mac OS X Tiger and it does appear as though a lot of the features Microsoft has been touting as significant, such as live desktop searching and 3D / transparency effects to name but two, have been around for sometime in the Mac world.

But for the masses of PC users out there, I'm sure it will be fun and interesting to finally get to use a nicer looking, stable operating system. And with more than 100m computers predicted to be using it worldwide within 12 months, that will be quite a few people!

It's about time Windows dragged itself into the 21st century but the real test will be when people can compare it to Leopard, coming this spring.