At the risk of stating the obvious: now is not yet a good time to upgrade to Vista. That much is generally expected with a new operating system. What’s unexpected is that it’s some of the biggest partners who aren’t ready. Microsoft’s own developer tools for Vista are still in beta. Basic hardware drivers are missing. NVIDIA and ATI are missing drivers for major, current-generation video hardware. And worse, marketing materials from Microsoft and some of their larger partners are distorting the reality of the situation.

Unless you have drivers in hand for your computer, your graphics drivers, your sound hardware, and confirmed Vista-ready updates for your critical apps, I wouldn’t even bother putting Vista on a second partition. There’s just no benefit right now. (If you were a beta tester, of course, go for it — but I’d say even early adopters may want to wait another couple of weeks.) Now, you’ll hear lots of members of the PC press say “don’t upgrade; wait until you buy a new system.” That’s ridiculous. The whole advantage of the PC platform is upgrading. And the real problem is that even brand-new machines are unlikely to work, because the problem is drivers and apps — not how new your hardware is or whether it was “built for Vista.”

Based on what I’m seeing, I do think the current incompatibilities are unlikely to last long; I’ve seen some encouraging signs that people with simpler setups may be able to update in the next few weeks to two months, and, frankly, given the size of this OS, that’s not all that bad. But right now, the upgrade process is likely to be a nightmare for almost everyone. And the really frustrating thing is that the very companies claiming to be ready are often the ones who aren’t.