The IT manager where I work is waiting for one of the major companies in our area (whom he used to work for) to report positive results from the migration to the Vista platform. Until then our company will stay with XP Pro platform for all work stations (except two or three Vista test systems).

I do however have a home system running Vista Business (32 bit) on hardware that was close to the leading (bleeding?) edge in the end of 2006. I successfully applied the stand-alone Vista SP1 to this system twice (once with all software programs in place - this was to test the stand-alone version installation - and then a second time with just the Vista OS and hardware drivers in place prior to installing SP1).

All performance increases are small but welcome. I do notice better rendering speed of the icons in the explorer shell which is nice.

I would say this makes Vista perform the way I would have expected it to peform on original release. Not great but acceptable.

On a fresh install of Vista, plus all the updates, it was taking my HP Pavilion DV6000 series laptop about four minutes to reach my desktop. I'm assuming it was a hardware or driver issue, but now with SP1 installed, it takes only one minute to completely boot.
SP1 has finally made me very happy with Vista, though I know my problem was special.

Note to XP users: don't forget that before SP2 came out, XP was worse than Vista is now.
Just this week I did a clean install of XP with no service packs installed, and I was shocked at how slow and unstable the system was, but once I put in SP2, the improvement was enormous.
I had forgotten how bad it used to be.

I can't wait for SP2 for Vista.

i am new to computers(just over a year of experience)and i must say i have learned most of what i know,from you people.Most of you are very interesting to read.thank you.

Thank you very much for the encouragement Tech4me,i'ts very much appreciated.

Hey, thank you all for your Recommends and especially your comments. This is a brand-new blog and I want to make of it what's most useful/interesting/fun to all of you, so I really appreciate the feedback.

My own experience w/Vista has been so-so. It really bombed my system once -- lucky I had Linux on another partition. But when I tried to roll back to XP I couldn't find a disc that would install on my system without a bunch of extra drivers. Looks like I'm stuck w/Vista. So far the Service Pack hasn't caused me the slightest trouble. But has it really helped me any? That remains to be seen.

istanbul and Tech4me, stick around. You're inexperienced, but you're curious. You remind me of myself when I was -- well -- probably half your age! You're the type of people who got me into the business of writing about tech to begin with.

I bought a new Acer with Vista on it. There's hasn't been any trouble since I turned the machine on. Vista, even with the new SP1 is still a little slow and a memory hog but all in all it does what it's supposed to do. Maybe the solution to some of the problems is to get more memory for your machines. Mine came with 2 GB. I believe 1 GB is not enough. There seems to be a general comment among my software friends that if you want Vista, the best solution is to get a new system with Vista already installed. That way there won't be any hardware conflicts. After all these years we should know better than to expect Operating Systems to "get it right the first time". Given all the different computer systems and all the different peripherals out there it's going to take at least three years for the Vista system to satisfy everyone. As computer systems and peripherals get more complicated Operating systems will have to follow suit.

Marco, using Vista is a great idea. Get used to it. OS's come and go. People loved Dos 6.0, ouch. I have XP, Vista and Linux (Ubuntu). I have been using unix for a long time so Ubuntu was a good choice for me. XP is a good system but next to Vista seems like a small rock next to a big boulder. They all have their uses. Since you have a laptop and integrated graphics the games you play will seem slow on Vista. That's ok. Even though there will be very limited support for XP I would use it until the pc falls apart.