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Should you move to Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system? The answer is an unequivocal "yes and no."

Unlike previous Windows releases, Vista is not suitable for most old PCs. While new Windows operating systems always would run better on new hardware, you still could benefit from upgrading your old machine. Not so with Vista. If your PC is less than three to six months old, it probably will work with Vista - especially if it is one of those sold as "Vista ready" (in which case you can hassle the seller if it isn't). A PC that's less than a year old might work, although some hardware and software tweaks probably would be required.

Anything older than that: Forget about it. You are unlikely to have the processor speed, memory, and graphics capability to make Vista worthwhile.

The reason is that Vista incorporates a very slick - but very hardware-intensive - interface called "Aero." With a new PC equipped with the necessary hardware, Vista will operate smoothly and slickly. Thus, the "yes and no" answer. Yes, you definitely want Vista on a new PC. No, you do not want to rush out and upgrade an old one.

Because of this, none of my existing Windows computers was even remotely capable of running Vista. So I turned to the folks at HP and Dell for help. HP lent me a Pavilion m7680n desktop and Dell loaned an Inspiron E1705 laptop.

Both have dual-core Intel processors (meaning that there are two processing "brains" in the chip, to speed up multitasking), high end graphics cards, lots of memory and disk space, plus the audio-video capabilities for "Windows Media Center." This is an integrated music, video - and TV/digital video recorder - package that used to be a separate version of Windows, but now has been made a feature of the Home Premium and Ultimate versions of Vista.

Curiously, with all the multimedia features, Media Center specs do not include cameras and microphones for recording and video conferencing. For that, I installed Microsoft's LifeCam VX-6000 for desktops and NX-6000 for notebooks. They are nicely designed devices that provide good picture and sound quality, work well in Vista (with a software upgrade available from Microsoft's Web site), and supported video messaging both with Microsoft's own Windows Live Messenger and AOL Messenger.

Both PCs were impressive when put through their paces. They were discernibly faster than older PCs. "Discernibly," in my testing means just that: faster from the perspective of actual user experience, not some lab benchmark. They also were replete with helpful features. The Dell, for example, has six USB ports - resolving a chronic shortcoming of notebooks - and HP puts some of its USB ports and outputs on the front of the unit for easy access - resolving a chronic annoyance in desktops.

Both are good choices for home use (although note that the HP is being phased out in favor of a new model).

The differences I saw between them had mostly to do with installation methodology. The Dell came factory equipped with Vista and Dell's software bundle. On the other hand, I erased the HP hard drive and did a "clean" installation of Vista.

Conclusion: for the moment, clean is better as some bundled software conflicted with additional software I installed. The downside of clean is that it takes away a lot of features in the software bundles. If you are not in immediate need of a PC, I suggest waiting a month or two while Vista software incompatibility issues are ironed out.

The Aero interface makes heavy use of 3D and translucent effects to better enable users to juggle multiple applications and documents that are open at the same time. There also is a much improved search capability and the increasingly ubiquitous mini-applications such as calendars, notepads and the like, which Microsoft calls "gadgets." Networking in Vista is a mixed blessing. Connecting a network is much easier than previous Windows editions, but sharing files over the network is much harder because of tougher security issues.

Therein lies the key element of Vista. All the other stuff such as Aero are really bells and whistles. The real reason for the system is to drastically tighten security features that have left Windows systems vulnerable to one hacking attack after another. From the user perspective, Vista can be a little annoying because Microsoft has tilted dramatically from letting pretty much any kind of system change take place unchallenged to an interface in which warnings and confirmation dialogs seemingly pop up constantly.

The verdict is still out on the effectiveness of these measures, of course. The hackers are no doubt preparing to pounce, and we will soon see whether Vista's defenses will hold. With 90-plus percent of the world's personal computers running on Windows, there is a lot riding on the answer.