The shiny, new Windows Vista beckons, and an upgrade is mighty tempting. But before you take the plunge, be aware that you may end up forking out a lot more money than just the cost of an operating system upgrade. If you’re upgrading to Windows Vista, the first cash outlay you likely face is buying more RAM for your PC and 1GB of RAM for as low as a little over $100, while 2GB will run you $180 and up. Vista is graphics-hungry. If you want to run its Aero environment, you’ll need a good graphics card with support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, a minimum of 128MB of graphics memory, and what’s called Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel. You can get a graphics card that meets these specs for as low as about $60. If you want better performance, of course, you can pay more, in the $100 to $150 range. Vista installs only via DVD and these you can get a reasonable one for as low as about $30 to $40. You should have a hard drive with at least a 40GB capacity hard drive with 15GB of free disk space and can get more for $70 or $80 with a 250GB capacity. Hidden costs can finally total up steep being the bottom line!