I've been using Vista for a while now. I have it on my laptop, a machine at work, and a machine I built for it at home.

For a long time now we've been listening to the MS guys we work with talk about how great the OS is. They talk about how much the core OS is improved from memory management to the cache manager. Of course these are kernel people so we never talked about the GUI.

My vote? Thumbs up, I'm a fan. As I said, I've installed this on several machines. The install process is good but it still takes longer than I think it should. Vista had drivers for all my hardware, even the custom built machine, except for the SATA RAID driver which I had to download from the manufacturer. One cool thing is that you can choose to put in the product key or not. If you don't put in a product key you get 30 days (IIRC) to eval.

One very intriguing option is a "no GUI" boot mode. I'll have to play with this some time.

On my laptop I have enabled BitLocker volume encryption. This has performed very well. I don't notice it at all. This was pretty much a pain to get set up since I did it after I already had Vista up and running. Supposedly it is easier to do at install time. Also, changing the boot options (like configuring for debug) is more painful with BitLocker on. It doesn't like this and you have to make it happy.

The GUI is excellent. I don't usually worry about this kind of stuff too much, but it does grow on you. Some options that I'm used to are buried and hard to find. For example, I always like to turn off the hiding of file extensions and the hiding of hidden/system files. The only way I could find to do this was to resort to the online help until someone showed me that pressing the "alt" key will show the old menus in an explorer window.

The online help is excellent. I've never used this feature in Windows before so I don't know how to compare to previous OSs. I've been able to find information that I've needed very quickly and it's been very helpful for the most part.

Performance has been good for me although I'm running on relatively new hardware. The only thing I wish was faster is my video perf on my laptop. It scores about a 3 on the Vista benchmark. It does aero pretty well but I notice it being sluggish sometimes.

I heard people complaining about the constant security prompts and thought for sure this would bother me. It hasn't. This is very useful for me but I wonder how non-power users will like it or if they will even know what is going on.

I haven't used a ton of applications on Vista yet. I have imported and used layers created on XP with great results. Office 2003, Google Earth, Picassa, Firefox, etc. The only glitch I ran into was that I had to remove a MSVCRT71 dll from the Google Earth package to get it to work. We don't have support for Vista with our corporate AV solution yet so I've been using Windows Live OneCare. I don't have an opinion on this yet other than it installs fine and doesn't appear to impact perf too much. The other missing piece of software is that our corporate VPN client doesn't support Vista yet.

I am also waiting for Dell to provide network print drivers for my all-in-one home printer.

Waking up from sleep mode is blazingly fast. This is literally no more than a second or two. But it does take longer to reconnect to the network. Also my home-built machine has trouble staying in sleep mode. Apparently this can be caused by improperly working hardware drivers (maybe my SATA RAID?)

Something else I really like is much better support for things like connecting to WiFi networks, entering presentation mode, etc. I used to have to install 3rd party pieces to get this functionality and now it is just built in.

Some other things I'm looking forward to experimenting with are the DVD creator and the Media Center features.

In summary there are many things that I like. MS has done a good job with this OS. When a few more of my critical apps show up I'll be able to move over permanently.