Not much has gone right for Microsoft’s fledgling OS. First it was delayed over three years (initially it was meant to be a stopgap between XP and 7, but then turned into a fully fledged OS), then stories of incompatible software and drivers surfaced. Most recently Vista Service Pack 1 was pulled from Automatic Download. Now that it’s back up and running it could very well be the one and only service pack ever released for the struggling OS.

Microsoft has shot itself in the foot in two ways with regards to Vista. Firstly, it went ahead with the release of Service Pack 3 for the hugely popular Windows XP. Secondly, its progress on Windows 7 and its potential release ahead of schedule has been extensively covered by the media. What this means is that consumers who were reluctant to switch from a perfectly reliable XP SP2 to Vista now have no reason to. They have a fresh upgrade in SP3 that should be able to see them through the roughly 1.5 years until Windows 7 hits shelves.

No matter what kind of reluctant computer user you are, swapping to Vista just doesn’t make sense anymore. There are a few different perspectives you can look at it from. It’s hard to come up with reasons for broad groups of computer users, like gamers, business users and home users to migrate to Vista as well.

Gamers especially should be running for the hills whenever they hear the word Vista. Yes, it’s the only way you can get DirectX 10, but is that really a big enough carrot to dangle in front of gamers? Not by a long shot. While DirectX 10 delivers a significant improvement in graphics, Vista provides a significant drop off in performance, even with SP1. In fact, it’s been proven that installing SP1 could actually make your PC slower. What’s more, over a year after Vista was released, there still isn’t a compelling enough library of games that make good enough use of DirectX 10 to justify the upgrade (around 20 only if