When I was a young reporter, the rollout of a new version of Windows created the sort of a frenzy you’d expect if the world’s best circus came to town.

Stores opened at midnight on the day the new Windows was introduced, and I often was assigned to stand outside with the excited crowds. You haven’t really lived until you’ve stood in the cold to watch hundreds of nerds stampede into a consumer electronics store.

There’s still some commotion with a new Windows release but it lacks the intensity. Some of my readers even wonder if the most recent version, Vista, is more of a white elephant than a real performer. Almost daily, I hear from readers who want to know how to move back to XP. I’ll include a link here to a page that does a good job of explaining the process: http://tinyurl.com/269mm4 .

Microsoft has tacitly acknowledged that some users want XP back after trying Vista. It’s allowing the continued sale of XP and — more important — extended XP support to 2014. Without support, XP would essentially be useless. Plenty of readers will be pleased that it’s relatively easy to move back to XP, and that they’ll be able to get help from Microsoft for years to come if they stick with XP.

I can also understand why Apple is using Vista discontent promote itself as an alternative. To be blunt, I think moving to a Mac is a viable choice.

All that said, I’ve been reasonably pleased with Vista myself. I run it on a machine with two gigabytes of memory and a processor chip running at more than 3 gigahertz. Unlike many users running it with older software, printers, scanners and other add-on devices, I’ve had no problems. I like it.

Vista has more going for it than my testimonial. One plus is that Service Pack 1, which most Vista users should have by now, fixed some glaring trouble spots. Vista seems to run a bit faster and improvements were made to a a really annoying feature called UAC (user account control) that nagged you like a mother-in-law.

Here’s how I see things: PC users can either switch to Mac, tweak Vista for maximum performance or stick with the increasingly outdated XP. I think the first two options make more sense, since XP will inevitably be obsolete. (Of course, if you have XP on an older computer and expect to buy a new one in a year or two, there’s certainly no harm in sticking with it until you get the new on.)

For those who have Vista and are relatively happy, here are three things that’ll help get the most out of it:

*Plenty of RAM memory. I have 2 gigs and even more is useful. My uncle, an engineer who designed computer operating systems, has 5 gigs and swears he sees a difference.

*A good video card. Graphics is a huge part of Vista. My video card has 512 megabytes of dedicated video memory, and I saw improvements when I moved from a 126-meg card.

*An up-to-date processor chip. Any of the multi-core processors are good. Older single-core processors in the high 2 gigahertz range or better are adequate.
For more tweaks, check out this excellent article from Information Week: http://tinyurl.com/4am7z7