Windows Vista's launch was a very troubled one with plenty of issues which quickly created a very negative image for this operating system. Six months after its launch, we ran a survey to identify the top problems users were confronted with. The results were very clear. Our readers said that the top issues were the lack of proper drivers (36% of votes) and application compatibility issues (36% of votes). These two, combined with a very weak offering of security solutions seriously impacted their user experience.

In this article I will go through each of these areas and share with you the current status on Windows Vista plus the outlook for the upcoming Windows 7 launch. Will Windows 7 share the same issues at launch?

If you are one of the many readers who are very happy with the content we provide, you might want to know that there are many ways you can say "Thank You!". In this short blog post, I will give you a few suggestions on how you can help the editorial team. As you will see, there are many ways in which you can chip in. Some of them will require only a few seconds of your time.

Back in the summer of 2007, we started a small series of interviews entitled "Getting to know the Microsoft enthusiasts". Up until now we interviewed five people, all of them passionate bloggers about Windows Vista and Microsoft products, bloggers which help people by writing great tutorials and finding solutions to computing problems. The folks from The WinVista Club have decided to interview the interviewer, and they have published an interview with me.

Another year has passed and our site is almost two years old. 2008 has been a good year for us in many ways, with its share of success, failures and lessons learned. Today, I will tell you about 2008 and what it has meant for the Windows Vista for Beginners team.

Our friends from The WinVista Club have recently released a nice little tool called Ultimate Windows Tweaker. As you can imagine, the tool allows you to tweak lots of aspects in Windows Vista. For a complete list of available tweaks (over 130 in total), check out the tweaks page.

Last month, we published an article called Windows 7 and Windows Vista features that need to be fixed. The purpose of the article was to start a constructive discussion with Windows Vista users about what they believe Microsoft should improve or add to Windows 7. With the help of other Windows Vista sites, we managed to spread the word about this idea and we have received lots of constructive feedback. Here is what Windows Vista users had to say:

Our friends from the The WinVista Club are running a competition who will decide which is the best Windows Vista website on the internet. The panel of judges have named our site as one of the finalists in this competition. The winner will be chosen by public voting. If you want to vote, please click here and submit your opinion.

We encourage you to visit all the finalists and vote for the site which has the best original content of interest & use to a Windows Vista user.

A few weeks ago we started a poll in which we asked our users if they are using Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or not. We received a total of 154 answers. Out of these, 79% of the responders said that they are using SP1 and 21% said that they are not.

Considering the fact that Windows Vista SP1 delivers a lot of improvements, it is really great to see that the big majority of our readers have adopted Service Pack 1. I'm sure that in just a few months, the percentage of people using it will get very close to 100%.

Our friends from WinVistaClub, in association with Windows Vista - The Official Magazine, are organizing a contest to recognize some of the best Windows Vista Blogs and Websites. If you run a blog or a website, which primarily focuses on Windows Vista you can submit your blog and participate. The blogs will be judged on the basis of quality of content, integrity, along with the frequency of updates. More details about prizes and how to submit your blog can be found here.