Yesterday I went out to the the Union and bought myself a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron, has a 1.7GHz Intel processor, 1 Gb or Ram and several external hard disks. The student license costs me ~20$, roughly the cost of two dinners. Vista roughly rates performance as 3.6 for my machine - the bottleneck being my processor speed.

I had heard several conflicting opinions about the OS, most being negative. I finally decided to try it to find out. I must say that in the past day or so my experience has been mostly pleasant. As a matter of fact the OS is yet to do anything to upset me very much.

Yes it is slightly slower than XP on my machine (my previous 2 year old XP setup had degenerated to crawl, so in cases it is actually faster than XP). Despite being slower it is not too frustrating as they have taken care of a vast number of small details, that makes the system more pleasant to use.  The weather gadget for example means that I don't have to use that piece of bloat from weather.com. Outlook actually seems to start a little more promptly on this OS.

Things like the fact that the OS asks about privilege escalations is rather nice. Even other things, like the fact that they did something as goofy sounding as brining your systems performance down to a single number makes a it rather handy. Most of the time people ask things like, "I have this hardware and this setup... will the following software run on it", now there is some heuristic with which you can come to an answer without relying on your local bullshit-expert. This is all entertaining and daresay, even useful.

I like the Aero look. I like the Win+Tab combination. I like the fact that they don't run the indexer all the time and bog down the system like they do on XP. I like how access control and such is better integrated into the UI. A better file copy interface finally. It also seems like there are some scheduler hacks to better prioritize interactive and foreground processes. Altogether a nice package.

Kudos Microsoft! I was truly skeptical and I had my XP installer handy. Now lets see how all this hold out for a few months.