I have hesitated to publicly discuss my experiences with Vista, acting under the theory that if you can't say something nice you shouldn't say anything at all. But at this point I have some nice things to say (though not all nice), and I think there's some value in sharing my experiences and thoughts. On the whole, my experience with Vista has been decidedly mixed. Vista is very pretty. It is clearly the future in many ways (especially around IIS 7 and WAS and security in general). And it has some nice usability features – like a far better replacement for ntbackup, and pre-enabled shadowing (so you can retrieve old files if you lose/overwrite them). And quite a few OS features are easier to find/use than in XP (once you get used to the changes). However, it is slower and more resource-intensive than XP. So you can’t upgrade from XP and expect the same level of performance or responsiveness on the same hardware. If your hardware is more than a few months old, I really can't recommend an upgrade. I upgraded my (now 2 year old) laptop when Vista came out, and have been generally displeased with the results. It is running Vista Business. However, as Vista has aged Microsoft has issued patches/fixes/updates that have helped with stability and performance. I would say that it is now tolerable, or at least I’ve learned to live with it. While it is workable, it isn't really satisfying - to me at least. My laptop is a dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a low-end
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