I'm about 25 days into the experiment now, and so far the verdict is that I'll probably keep Vista running on the laptop. It
is pretty fat considering drive-space, but the system feels pretty snappy and responsive. I feel a bit tempted giving XP a spin, to see if it runs even snappier, but can't really be bothered setting it up (I do have multiple partitions so wouldn't have to nuke my Vista install, but there's the issue of MBR/bootloader etc, and hunting down drivers etc takes time).
Regarding fonts - I think my "Do standard fonts like Courier New look differently in Vista, or is it just me?" is just due to having only standard font smoothing enabled on my desktop, but cleartype on the laptop - duh
. The new fonts on Vista are nice-ish, but I still use Dina (and not the praised Consolas) for text-editors and IDEs.
I still don't like the new explorer, so I'm still happy that I use
xplorer^2. I guess I could live with the new explorer, and I don't exactly hate it, but I don't particularly like it either.
It still annoys me that there doesn't seem to be a way to always show shortcut underlines, not just when keeping ALT pressed. Why did Microsoft remove this functionality? :-s
The new standard open/save dialog boxes are a step forward from XP, I like the favorites etc... but they could be less cluttered, and they certainly aren't very keyboard-navigation friendly. Could be designed better, but is better than standard XP without extenders.
After updating the intel GMA graphics driver (and perhaps some windows updates?), it seems that I haven't had graphics crashes for a while. I haven't had a lot of UAC prompts either though (which seemed to be the main cause of graphics driver crashes). Never was a
problem though, since the graphics driver is usermode and didn't cause BSODs.
I'm undecided about the new Control Panel. I don't see it as much better or worse than the old XP control panel, mainly just...
different. Slightly annoying that some configuration options take more clicks to get to, but I don't have to fiddle with that stuff very often, so not much of an issue.
The thing that annoys me the most is that I sometimes get complete lockups - happens when I attach USB devices (mouse, pendrive, whatever) or use the card reader (which seems to be connected as an internal USB device). Haven't been able to pinpoint exactly when it happens, but it
seems that it's only if the machine has been in hibernation state. Completely lockup, can't even move mouse cursor, and I have to do a hard poweroff. Dunno if this is a Vista or hardware issue, I'm going to contact Zepto and check whether other people have had similar issues.
Oh, there's a single unknown device listed in my device manager, and I haven't been able to find any useful information about it - it's located on "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Embedded Controller", and it's Instance Path is ACPI\ACPIHIDMAPPER\5&15D725F4&0 . It's Parent is ACPI\PNP0C09\1 . AFAIK I have all drivers installed, and googling for the ID hasn't brought up anything useful.
The only real issue I've had so far that I'm absolutely sure is Vistas fault, is that the wifi network driver shit itself and died, for some unexplainable reason.
p3lb0x was visiting, playing
World Of Goo, when the game suddenly started running very slowly, crashed to desktop, and there was some "warning triangle" notify icon... after a reboot, wifi was gone. I had to uninstall + reinstall the driver to get it working again, weird stuff.
Oh, I sometimes have problems connecting to the WiFi at home, but I think that's an issue with my wifi setup rather than with Vista. Works fine at school and other places.
I still like the new taskbar (including the battery, volume and network connection icons - like
wreckedcarzz mentions, they're really nice, rocks having visual status indicators right in the tray. And they look pretty.)
The new start menu is also lovely, and quite a step forward from XP. Since I'm a
FARR fan, I don't use it supermuch, though. But without FARR, it's definitely a step forward, and if I used the indexed search stuff, I would probably appreciate it even more.
AERO... I'm still annoyed with it's looks. Better than the XP fisherprice theme, but I'd prefer a classic 2k/XP style look but
still with acceleration as well as the new taskbard+startmenu look. If Microsoft would at least support custom themes without having to use dirty hacks,
*sigh*. The acceleration
is pretty cool though, I love having app previews on hovering mouse over the taskbar, and on alt+tab. I know it's possible to achieve something like this on XP, but it's done via dirty hacks rather than proper system support. Flip3D is a cute gimmick, but I don't find it very useful.
Oh, I'm still running "full UAC" - no tweaks, haven't diabled the "protected desktop", etc. I don't really find it annoying once the initial new-setup-install-spree is done (and you can disable it temporarily while doing that, anyway).
I find myself using the laptop more and more, and my workstation less and less. Should make a difference wrt. my power bill - there's been too much partying-till-6AM lately though, which has sorta evened out the gains
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