VIM is very powerful tool and to get the most out of it you need to configure it to behave the way you want and need!!!
This is my version of VIM configuration file. It should work for both Windows and Unix version of vim and does not require any special plugins (Just make sure you don't have VIM installed in Program Files directory in case of Windows - it would be difficult to hadle privileges in a safe way and some errors may occur if vim would try to write to vimfiles directory).
There are some useful mappings for managing buffers, tabs and windows, automatically adding closing brackets and other useful stuff I use daily when I am programming. There is also my definition of statusline with colourful mode indication - I spent hours by figuring out how it works :) All of this I wrote myself, it is mostly based on vim documntation and credit goes also to some stackoverflow.com answers (I am really sorry, I do not remember all of them, as I started to use vim long time ago and my vimrc has been updated continually).
Feel free to use this file or get inspired by this when writing your own vimrc file. This file should be saved under your home directory (User folder in case of MS Windows) and should be called .vimrc under Linux or _vimrc in case of Windows.