Few Rush Out to Buy New Windows Vista

A Japanese shopper buys Windows Vista as the Microsoft Corporation's first new operation system since 2001 goes on sale at a Japanese retailer during a midnight promotional event in Tokyo, Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2007. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) (Shizuo Kambayashi - AP)

"I just want to make sure it's something that's going to work well," she said.

During the past few weeks, shelves in the computer section at a Best Buy in midtown New York have been essentially bare, as consumers lost interest in laptops with XP and the retailer cleared space to sell new machines running Vista, which imposes such hardware requirements as 1 gigabyte of system memory, or RAM.

Consumers who want to upgrade a relatively new XP computer can expect to drop $100 to $259 for Vista alone, depending on the version (a standalone version of Vista costs up to $399, but it is already included in the price of new PCs). While Microsoft boasts that 1.5 million devices are Vista-compatible now, analysts warn of a potentially rocky transition.

"The real proof I think is going to be in the first few weeks, where we see if all the vendors really stepped up to getting their drivers right," said Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner, a research group. "It is definite that some things won't work, especially if you're trying to make an older PC learn new tricks."

But as in the past, most consumers will switch to Vista only when they buy new computers, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday during a launch-related event.

Microsoft shares slipped 5 cents to close at $30.48 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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Associated Press writers Elizabeth Dunbar in Raleigh, N.C., Matt Slagle in Dallas, Jordan Robertson in San Francisco and Thomas J. Sheeran in Brooklyn, Ohio, contributed to this report.