Mossberg on Vista: Best Windows Yet, Awful Purdy

, be ready for a flood of praise and excoriation. The latest comes from Walthus Mossberg the Great of the WSJ who says:

Vista is much prettier than previous versions of Windows. Its icons look better, windows have translucent borders, and items in the taskbar and in folders can display little previews of what they contain. Security is supposedly vastly better; there are some new free, included programs; and fast, universal search is now built in. There are hundreds of other, smaller, improvements and additions throughout the system, including parental controls and even a slicker version of Solitaire.

I’ve played with it a little and I agree about the Solitaire, but I’m hard-pressed to recommend the software to anyone without the latest hardware. Will we all eventually be using Vista in our head-mounted UMPC prototype space suits? Sure. But the real question is how many people will buy an upgrade as opposed to the masses who just have an upgrade thrust upon them as old PCs break and die.

Vista: Worthy, Largely Unexciting [WSJ]