My experiences with Windows Vista so far
I've had my new computer set up for about a week now, so I've had some time to play with Windows Vista (Home Premium, not that the version matters very much).
So far, so good.
I have an HP with an AMD 64 X2 dual core processor, 3 GB RAM, a 400 GB SATA hard drive, and an NVIDIA video board with 256 MB of video memory. With that hardware, Vista runs very smoothly, even with the transparent-glass Aero interface turned on.
That's been a big surprise. I expected Aero to be fairly slow, but it isn't noticeably slower than with Aero turned off.
My old computer has been a workhorse for me for over nine years now (yes, I'm a programmer with a 9-year-old PC at home -- go ahead and laugh), so I felt significant trepidation at the thought of transferring everything to a new machine. So far, I've moved thousands of documents, photographs, and emails without a hitch (I have all my email going back to 1994). I've attached all of my external gadgets with only one incompatibility -- my Canon scanner won't work with Vista, but that isn't really a surprise, since Canon stopped updating drivers for it about three or four years ago.
All my other gadgets work fine; I have three (!) external hard drives, a wireless network adapter, two card readers, a video camera, a still camera, a stereo headset with microphone, a PDA, an ancient Iomega ZIP drive, and a set of Altec Lansing 5.1 speakers. Except for the speakers, all these devices are USB. Everything hooked up and worked with no problems, although I had to install the factory software for my camera, video camera, and PDA. Vista natively recognized everything else, including the ZIP drive.
I haven't disabled any of the extra services, although there are bound to be several that are unnecessary. Several people have reported performance degradation in Vista with the Windows Search service running and have recommended disabling it, but disabling that service also results in Vista not being able to manage the virtual shortcuts to things like the Pictures and Music folders. Instead of disabling Windows Search, I simply excluded all folders from its indexing list; this permits the service to manage those virtual folders without chewing up system resources to index all my files. So far, that seems to work pretty well.
Vista has received a lot of bad press (and justifiably so, since it requires basically new hardware to run), and I'm usually the first to criticize the clumsiness of new Microsoft products. But so far, I have no significant complaints about Vista.
Knock wood.