Under the cloak of innovation Microsoft’s windows upgrades go from bad to worse to nightmarish.
If you rather have Microsoft to control your (virtual) life, then upgrade and give away your freedom to use and control your computer as you want it. Why bother anyway, Microsoft knows so much better what is good for you and what the consumer really wants, right? Rather than being fooled by Microsoft’s marketing, go to BadVISTA to see what’s wrong with vista and what alternatives there are. For a security analysis of vista’s content protection mechanism, its costs, who will pay for it (guess!), and whether it actually works see Peter Gutmann’s A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.
All I can recommend is to avoid any content protection mechanisms and systems supporting it, especially vista. In practice content seems to be impossible to protect anyway. On vista it took less than a week to find a first way around the protection system. Furthermore, for nearly everyone high definition (HD) is not required – it’s just a way to make you buy new products for the same old awful stuff. See Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, 2003 to gain an understanding of why image size is much more important than resolution. With good quality non-HD equipment you probably get an as good picture as with HD for all sensible purposes. The only reason I can think of for going HD is to show off your fancy new equipment as the actual content is not worth mentioning.
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