mmarsh

I have been in in the Beta program (both Personal and Corporate) and I got to play with both Beta 2 and RC 1.

I would describe Vista as a improvement over XP espically in the GUI and security areas but its hardly a major upgrade. Its also not terribly original. Most of its ideas have been 'borrowed' from Mac OS X and they don't work as well as the Mac counterparts. Its a shame MS couldnt get MS:FS working in time. Also some of the new gadgets arent particularily exciting FireFox 2.0 is better than IE.7 and the touted All-in-One isn't bad, but BitDefender 10 is just as good and a much cheaper.

First of all to run Vista well your going to need a good machine. For Aero your going to need a 128MB graphic card (with a good 3d accelerator) and also I would strongly recommend 2 Gigs of RAM, Vista is a resource pig.

Also for IT professionals, you might want to beware about inserting Vista clients onto an existing XP/2000 domains. Windows VISTA Enterprise GP policies are very different from previous version of Windows. When we were doing some testing in our lab, instead of trying to become compatible with the existing XP/2000 policies it actually tried to change the existing policies so that they would work with it. It was a good thing we were running on a test network. We wont be switching VISTA for at least a year, probably 2. We generally don't install new OS's until the first SP is released.

MS has subsequently issued a warning about this.

Still for my home PC I will be upgrading. Why? I am a Network Engineer and like it or not, its the future. I plan to get my certification beginning 2007.