That's right, you didn't think!

I think there are probably several serious problems with Vista yet to be worked out, but I haven't experienced them for the most part.  I'll say that it hasn't been perfect, but my PC is handling Vista Ultimate rather well.  I made sure that when I purchased my PC, the parts would all be good enough to run Vista at a 5.0 star rating, and I do get a 5.0 rating.  I've had a couple problems, with a USB bluetooth adapter, which has limited driver support at the moment, and Vista drivers coming soon, and I also had to install new drivers from Nvidia to get a stable video driver.  Other than those overall minor issues, I've had no other specific problems with the hardware I have.

 

The only thing that holds back Vista on my PC is the intensive hard drive usage that Vista seems to have at certain times.  I know what others have been talking about, as I've experienced some slow copy/move/delete dialogs.  I've been able to determine that Vista is often running background tasks (check the Task Scheduler, different than the Task Manager, and check the Resource Monitor as well) that use up all or most of my HDDs throughput, for example the indexing service is a pig, and it leads to "unexplainable" slowdowns.  I have a fairly fast hard drive, and I partitioned it carefully for Vista, yet still I sometimes feel I might need to put in a couple more drives and go for a RAID 5 setup in order to really use Vista Ultimate to it's best.

 

My partitioning scheme for one physical drive (ex. 250GB):

This is a partitioning and system configuration I have found will decrease fragmentation and increase responsiveness, and I used the same setup with XP with better performance than I had when I had tried to use just one big C: partition.  Keeping everything in one big lump on C: is a bad idea, for many reasons.  The overall idea is to put often accessed but rarely modified files on the first drive, so of course the OS and Programs should go there.  But data files and system files, which are modified often, need to be on separate partitions than the OS and programs, so as not to contribute to the C drives fragmentation.  Of course, you can get even better performance by adding another hard drive so that files can be on a physically separate drive from the OS and Programs.

 

There is no doubt about it, you need a beefy system to really get the best "experience" as Microsoft calls it, but I feel it's been worth it.

Vista has brought with it a whole set of new features, not the least of which is a more robust security model.  Recent advertisements by Apple Co. have made fun of the "sad realization" that Windows users are encountering with Vista, referring to the "nagging" User Account Control dialogs.  However this specific advertising is not only misleading, but down-right false.  In fact, MacOSX has always had it's own form of user account control, quite similar to Vista.  Strangely, Microsoft never seems to try and fight back with their own advertising, but who can blame them really.  Sometimes, it's better to ignore rather than acknowledge a competitor.

 

I feel better knowing I have to allow a change to the system, instead of possibly not knowing about it at all as it would've been with Windows XP.  It doesn't get in the way, or become annoying.  It's simply a reminder that what your doing isn't expected by the OS and so, well.. be careful.  You can still screw things up, but I have a strong feeling it will be much harder to stumble around breaking the OS this time.

So far, I really like it!  The new interface looks great, with transparency all over the place and nice animations.  I'll share more thoughts as I have them, maybe.