Vista

Some initial thoughts on my 'upgrade' to Vista:

I now have 3gigs of RAM, but my damned video card is the slow link now. Never thought that would happen.

If you can, don't 'upgrade,' do a clean install. Mine failed both times I selected the upgrade option. After 2.5 hours of installation each time.

When it was finally done:

I guess that most of the improvements are under the hood, because there aren't really a lot of obvious changes. The look and feel is improved - I think this is where the need for the new graphics card comes in. Of course, they are once again copying the Mac OS here.

The sidebar is interesting, and long overdue. Again, a cue from Macs.

They've gone to putting all your personal files in a reasonably placed directory! C:\Users\Name
Wow! It's been since what, Windows 95 that I've been cursing the idiot who decided to hide the path to your personal files. In this regard, they're copying Unix.

I know that security is supposed to be better, but do I really have to go through two pop up confirmations each time I want to delete a file or access a control panel? I need to see if I can turn that off.

So in conclusion, yeah, it looks better, and probably works better, but most of the tangible improvements are just Microsoft catching up to Mac and Linux. But since I'm stuck with Windows, I'll take it.