As previously stated in my rant about Dell, I purchased three Dell Inspiron Laptops. All of which came loaded with Vista Home Basic. Me being who I am promptly formatted the hard drive and got rid of all the Dell bullshit. I then loaded Vista Ultimate, I was going to load XP but I figured I would give Vista a chance. Here are my observations so far based on a few hours of messing with it.

Vista isn't as bad as I thought. The only experience I had with Vista prior to these laptops is messing with a Vista PC at BestBuy and that was strictly to torment Dell employees since they were logged on as an administrator. I still like XP better but that is me. So far it seems very stable running the hardware I purchased. The laptops have an Athlon X2 processor, can't remember the speed off hand, and two gigs of RAM. There is also an 80GB hard drive and an ATi video chip. I have yet to crash it but i really haven't tried.

Visually, Vista is stunning. Yes I know Mac users have had this visually stunning display forever and Mac users will say Windows stole it. Okay whatever, that may be true but I still think it is cool. The Aero interface is nice. I like the Alt-Tab look and feel. I like the pop up when you hover over a minimized window and I really like the Win-Tab display. The effects of closing a window are nice as is the transparency. I do not like the new start menu though. It just feels retarded. The extra steps needed to find the restart is frustrating but you get used to it. I really don't like the omission of the run command from the start menu. Yes you can add it to the start menu but it should be there by default.

The control panel is another area I don't like. It seems like there is too much crap there that is not really needed. It feels clunky. I am talking about the classic view. Getting to certain areas is awkward and I feel some things require too many clicks to get there.

As a power user I didn't have too much trouble navigating around but I think an average XP user will find it frustrating and awkward. I wish Microsoft would have taken that into consideration when designing the user interface. They could have kept it similar to XP's without sacrificing too much.

At my house I actually run a domain environment. I do have a Windows 2003 Server running as a Domain Controller. Joining the laptops was just as simple as doing it will XP except I had to click a couple of extra times to get to the screen I wanted. Right clicking My Computer and choosing Properties opens up a window and then I had to click on Advanced to get the familiar properties box I am used to in XP. Once there it was familiar territory. Once joined to the domain I was greeted with a new style login box. You still have to do the Ctrl-Alt-Del keystroke but instead of having a drop down menu where you can select your domain you just have to enter in the username starting with the domain first. So I had to do domain\username and then enter in the password. Not a big deal, you could do that in XP as well if you wanted to.

The only issue I have with Vista on a 2003 domain is there are a lot of new Group Policy settings for Vista that are not apart of 2003. Understandable but it would be nice if you could extend the Active Directory Schema to add these new features. Now there is a Schema extension for Vista wireless but the steps posted at TechNet didn't seem to work. I wish they did because I had a wireless issue with the first laptop that would have been fixed with the schema update. So I guess I need to wait for Windows Server 2008 before I can fully enjoy using Group Policy with Vista. The 2003 policies do work but I want access to the new ones.

Another issue I had was the actual install size of Vista. It registered in at 12GB before installing updates. WTF? I don't know if that is because I installed the Ultimate edition or what but holy shit Batman.

So far I have not run into any application or driver compatibility problems but I am sure I will. My daughter and wife have been using it for a couple of days and so far no real major complaints. My son will get his today so I will see if he has any issues within the next few days.

Will I recommend upgrading to Vista to my work? Heavens no, it isn't worth it. XP works and works well. No need to fix what isn't broke. But so far for home use it is just fine.