No upgrade to a new operating system is without risk, but if the upgrade works properly, you have have everything you had before. That said, be sure to make a backup of all your critical data and be sure to have the original install disks for all your applications just in case. Also do some research re your existing applications; some may require an upgrade or patch to be Vista compatible.
Being a bit of a geek, I am usually one of the first to upgrade to something new even if I don't need it. Vista has a few nice bells and whistles but it is a hardware hog. I run a Core 2 Duo E6600 with 4 GB RAM. I don't see much of a difference in speed but I did turn off some of the fancy graphics.
I just bought a new Sony laptop which came with Vista Business. It was annoyingly slow until I turned off the extra graphics stuff. For a mid-speed system, unless you have a specific need to upgrade to Vista, I would stick for XP for a while.
I have two drives, one which I have Xp on and most of my programs but I can reinstall them it will just take some time. But my second drive is a 1.5TB which contains all my data, music, videos, pictures, and other data that I have been collecting for years. I don’t want to install Vista and it not be able to read my data drive which has also beenpartitioned with PM.
Although I’m not a programmer, I can’t see why it would be difficult to upgrade or patch Partition Magic to fully support Vista. I know for a fact, that you shouldn’t use Partition Magic under Vista X64 on a Raid-0 partition - that will seriosly destroy the partition.
I have been using PartitionMagic for years. It is the best utility for non-destructively manage partitions. While Vista includes a very basic partition management utility, it does not come close to PartitionMagic. I encourage Symantec to upgrade PM as soon as possible to make it Vista compatible.