Installed Vista on my laptop. I’m currently doing my work in VMWare Ubuntu, pretty stable compared to the Vista build (5728) I’m on. Some notes on Vista:

1. Sound and graphics worked perfectly out of box.
2. Doesn’t handle my bluetooth. I tried installing the existing drivers, I keep getting an error. Installing the drivers works on their own installer, as long as they haven’t been installed before and as long as you don’t restart the machine. Restarting causes them to lose the device for some reason.
3. Can’t install Eclipse properly, keep getting a long filename error. Friends say they didn’t get that, so still in process.
4. Games run faster in Vista. I was running ut2k4 in 1280×720 (aspect ratio preserved) with all settings up, now I can run it at native res (1680×1050) with no problem. There’s about 8 processes running at one time.
5. Aero uses a lot of memory (sometimes about 50mb). For power-saving and video games I use a user account running Vista Basic (roughly 1200kb). Lately, I’ve been doing everything in that account.
6. Windows Key+X opens the mobility menu, you can switch between high performance (games) and power-saver (unplugged, usually in class).
7. Vista has a disturbing amount of DRM protection builtin. More on this later.
8. Even in Vista Basic, battery life isn’t as good, but still useable for class.

At first I was very impressed, but after using it for a while it looks like I’ll be going back to dual-boot, and using Vista just for games. It has a lot of neat file-handling things that use system resources, like automagically finding my music. It’s file exploring is kinda neat, with pictures of the folder contents displayed in the folder and a my documents folder (and public documents folder) that’s actually useful. However, I need coding tools, and before I know more about how it handles DRM and other such concerns looks like the only thing I’ll be using it for is games.

Edit: I forgot one important detail. Anytime you want to do something, say, install a program, Vista will ask for confirmation as much as 3 times even when running as an administrator. It will freeze your whole computer and ask you for confirmation for the program, confirmation of the administrator, and another confirmation that I don’t even remember because I zone out clicking YES INSTALL MY FREAKING PROGRAM ALREADY.