Microsoft Vista Home Basic

Pros: Not many. Eye candy if your hardware can handle it

Cons: Unstable Beta drivers for a lot of hardware, IE7 is just unusable, "feels" slower than XP. Tries to "fix" itself too much for its own good.

Summary: I have vista ultimate so basic is probably even less worth it. I had medium hopes for vista but even with low expectations, after using it for about 2 weeks now I am still disappointed. My machine is a P4 3.2Ghz, 1GB RAM and Radeon X800 128. One of the most basic things, the start menu is just terrible. When you click on "Programs" in XP, it pops up in an instant. In vista there is a very noticeable and annoying delay. When playing counterstrike the OS blue screens (yes, blue screens) on me and of course restarts. Sure, this is probably due to the beta ATI drivers but come on, why a complete OS crash?? Same thing when testing the webcam from my pinnacle video capture card (to be fair, also non-vista drivers). Vista has a "self-fixing" feature which tries to determine when a program has stopped responding and then tries to "find a solution" for this problem and, of course, never finds a solution for it and just kills the program. Most annoying is that it pops up an alert telling you it is trying to find a solution and my windows sidebar constantly has this problem and thus I constantly get popups. I'm not even gonna talk about IE. Just use firefox. I'm gonna stay on vista since slowly better drivers are coming out and I'm still hopeful it will improve. I understand that a lot of the problems are due to vendor drivers and MS is not fully responsible for that but the native vista features also just don't perform acceptably.
If you are buying a new computer, of course, get vista. All the hardware will likely work fine. If you are just looking to upgrade XP, hold off until you see a lot of good user reviews. You are not missing anything from vista.