The word on Vista is to avoid at all costs. Well I would have to say yes and no on this. If you are thinking of upgrading to vista then I would say NO! If however you are buying a 100% new system then I would say yes. So just to make that clear If you have a 3Ghz CPU and 256Mb graphics card and a gigabyte of RAM. Then NO you should not be running vista, If however you have a T5500+ Core 2 Duo or AMD equivalent a 256Mb ATI or Nvidia graphics card, 4 gigabyte of RAM and a copy of vista Home Premium then yes I would recommended vista.

Why not ultimate edition ?
The ultimate edition has an extra 14 services running as standard compared to Premium, It has a much higher demand on your graphics card RAM and CPU, and offers little bonuses to the GUI, and Media experience, while eating on average 20-25% more system resources for day to day tasks.
Ok so why not Home Basic ?
Home basic is designed, for systems with lower spec graphics cards, Great right ?.... No because it needs to get that speed from somewhere, So it does it will pass all the work to the CPU making your PC run like a dog because the CPU is so busy doing all the GUI work. This is not just an option it does not matter what graphics card you do have home basic will ignore it and pass the work to the CPU anyway, along with a lot of other stuff like phys and sound processing.

Home Premium ?
Without doubt Microsoft released vista a year early, XP was doing just fine the hardware requirements for vista have only JUST reached us in December 2007, If you have a PC purchased before December 2007 you will be getting mediocre results from vista to be honest, unless it had the highest configuration. Core2 Duo and Quad Core are absolute minimum specs to run vista, Myself im running a 3Ghz Core2 Duo Laptop with 384mb Video RAM and 4 gigabyte RAM, Duel 200Gb SATA Raided Disks, and it runs like a dream. I duel boot Linux as well.

The long awaited Vista service pack 1, Is here.... Well almost RC1 is now public. This is a pre-release of SP1

This pack include:-

USB Fix's - This is the only BIG problem I have had with vista to date.
General speed improvements
Better driver support
Faster graphics DX 10.1 Support
exFAT and 4GB+ RAM support
Security Improvements with reduced UAC requests
Application Compatibility Improvements
Better power saving on laptops (boosted by battery life by 10-15 minutes)
Better hibernation support (bugs fixed, I still don't use)
Better ReadyBoost support for systems with 1Gb + RAM
Faster file copying. The network isssue does seem fixed but I still find file copying in vista slower than XP
And loads more stuff, much I have not tested yet so I wont post here.
Full list here

Click the link below to download a small update that will allow vista's built in windows update to detect the avaliability of SP1 RC1, then do a windows update check and download of the SP1 will being.

Download

Overall the SP1 RC1 has improved vista a whole lot. Its just a shame its a year late. It is very much better late than never, maybe vista wont be the next Windows ME.