Despite my initial skepticism, I'm happy to report that my overall Vista experience has been good.  I installed it on my new Dell Latitude D820 soon after it was declared RTM.  The installation took less than 30 minutes and everything worked out of the box.  So the all important out-of-the-box experience was great! 

After seeing all of the XGL visual acrobatics on Linux desktops and learning that similar eye candy in Vista was removed for better usability, I thought I would be disappointed at the amount of GUI bling.  But after a few days of using the system, I'm very pleased with Aero glass.  It's a thing of beauty but it's not overpowering nor tiresome (so far).  With XP, I always switched from Luna to the Windows Classic theme but I have a feeling that I'll be sticking with Aero glass.  The desktop feels soothing, light and bright [even though I'm using a dark color scheme].  I'm liking it...

I've barely scratched the surface of new Vista features but some of things I like so far: Explorer (so much easier to navigate), Sidebar (I use the weather, CPU/RAM, and sticky note gadgets), Photo Gallery (no equivalent in XP), Task Scheduler,  search [esp the Start menu search], ability to enjoy Petzold's WPF samples like this and this instantly, presentation mode, beautiful fonts like Consolas & Calibri and UAC. 

UAC deserves special mention.  Similar in capability to privilege elevation methods in Ubuntu and other *nix, Vista UAC has improved tremendously since Beta 2.  Sometimes it's annoying (especially in the early hours/days of a fresh Vista OS installation when you're in the process of configuration and installation of new apps) but with UAC in place I feel so much more confident that malware can't just sneak up on me!  For me this is the most important feature in Vista and I wish Windows had it sooner...

 

Some things that don't quite work yet:

  • I extend my laptop’s Vista desktop with an external LCD that sits to my left.  After a restart, on wake up or return to the desktop after unlocking, the orientation is reset to the default so that my external LCD is to the right of my laptop LCD contrary to the way I configured it and the physical orientation.  I don't know whether this is a video driver issue (apparently this has been reported with NVidia & ATI drivers), a Vista issue or a combo of both.  Very annoying.
  • Even after selecting “Index properties and file contents” for PDF files, Vista's indexer DOESN'T search the body of a PDF!   After installation of a PDF filter, it works as expected but this needs to work out of the box.
  • IE7 is better than IE6 but it's not nearly enough to get me to switch from Firefox.  I'm hoping a future version of IE is more appealing. 
  • The logon screen wallpaper is ugly.  I need to find a way to change it!  Surprising since there are number of striking desktop wallpaper choices available.

So overall,  my honeymoon with Vista is progressing nicely.  I'm looking forward to discovering more cool features.  Vista has made my computing life easier and that's a big compliement.   I have hope that Vista (along with vastly improved Office 2007) is going change the everyday lives of everyday users for the better.