I have been using Windows Vista since RC1 came out early fall last year. All I can say is that I really like it. Sure there are some shortcomings right now and the hardware requirements are a tad high, but if you have the hardware and time, then I would fully recommend it to anybody. Let me tell you the story of my laptop:
I purchased my laptop around March 2006 after a water accident occurred with my last laptop. It came configured with the following hardware:
- Dell Inspiron E1505
- Intel Core Duo 1.66Ghz
- 1GB RAM
- 80GB Hard Drive
- ATI Mobility Radeon X1300
- Intel PROset wireless 3945ABG
- Windows XP Media Center Eddition
Sounds like pretty good hardware for Windows XP, huh? Well, all I can say is that Windows XP ran horribly on this machine. I'm not sure why, but it was slow, I always got the BSOD, it would freeze all the time, etc... Even with fresh installations of XP. Basically, XP was impossible to use on this laptop so I started looking for alternatives....
I tried linux, but it was too much of a hassle to configure and to use all my programs. I tried Windows 98
Yea... didn't go so well. Then I found Windows Vista Beta2. I installed it, liked the GUI, but it was way way too slow with all of the debugging software running and with the bugs left. So I went back to XP for a while.
So I believe in September they released Windows Vista RC1. I signed up for testing, got a spot, and installed it on my laptop. All I have to say is Wow! It was much improved from Beta2. I believe by this time they had gotten rid of most of the debugging problems. After it installed everything worked great. I later upgraded to RC2 to get some more features and bug fixes, and it worked great as well. Dell started to distribute beta drivers when I had RC2 installed. I had RC2 until February when I bought Windows Vista Home Premium. When I bought Vista, nothing really changed. They included the sounds and a few other features, but it was basically the same Vista I had become accustomed to. As far as compatibility, I haven't had too much trouble. I've had drivers since I installed Vista RC1. Some drivers have been shaky such as my wireless driver. My wireless card would randomly shut off for no reason, and I would have to restart my laptop to fix it, but I later found that it was because the newer drivers had a bug that would shut them off. I went back to the default Vista drivers and fixed that problem. I've only experienced the BSOD twice with Vista, once was due to a bad driver for my Dazzle video converter, and again due to my hard drive being corrupt. The UI is the best thing about Vista. It's much more responsive than XP used to be, the graphics are awesome, and they have many innovative features such as the individual volume controls for every program that makes a sound and the quick search feature in the start menu, which is my favorite feature. For a laptop, power usage is a critical problem. With XP I would only get 4 hours of battery running time. With Vista, I can control more aspects of my system and can squeeze out 5 hours of running time. Gaming may also be a concern for anybody on the Delphi community. I play HL2, HL, Dod with ease. The Sims2 also works fine. Basically from what I've seen, games will play as good as they do on XP or even better. Now... some OpenGL things are messed up. Basically, Vista was going to drop all OpenGL support, but they later added a converter to use DirectX10 for OpenGL, which causes it to be slower than normal. As far as program compatibility, I haven't run into any major problems. If I do run into a problem, I can usually select a compatibility mode that works. I have Photoshop Elements 5 installed and running good, Dreamweaver MX running, Microsoft Office 2003, Autocad 2006, along with other programs that may be used by this community. All of those programs work with Vista without any problem. Vista includes a performance report that comes in handy if your PC starts to run slow. All I do is open it up, and see what is causing my problems. Vista basically logs everything that happens on the computer, the boot up, while running, and shutting down. Right now it shows that my video drivers are conflicting with resuming from standby. It took about 25 minutes to install on my laptop. It takes about 40 seconds for my laptop to boot up to a point where it is usable and about 1 and a half minutes to shutdown. The Gadgets are pretty neat as well. Most of them are 3rd party and there are already about two hundred available. I usually don't use them because they get in my way, but lately I have been using them. I can't really think of any consequences of using Vista that you cannot get around.