Instead of answer each of you individually, I'll give you my impressions of Vista.
So far, it's pretty. I actually like the look of the Vista interface. Of course, I'm on a machine more than capable of running it with all the eye candy enabled without worrying about performance, so it may suck rocks on lesser machines. I keep hearing about this Flip-3d thing, but I have yet to find it, so I'm not going to comment on that, since I haven't encountered it yet.
I don't like that the "Power Button" on the Start Menu defaults to Sleep (when I hit the power button, I mean it goddammit). Changing that behavior is buried. Deeply. Finding where and how to change it was a fun little game of Keyword Bingo in the Help search, and even then, it involved finding which particular page it was mentioned, in passing, in the middle of.
I doesn't like my dock. I don't know why. It boots up in less than thirty seconds outside of the dock. In the dock? It's almost 5 minutes from hitting the power button until it'll display a login prompt. Looking at the Device Manager, there are no hardware conflicts, unrecognized hardware, or driver problems. It just hates being docked.
My outburst yesterday was in direct response to a problem I was having with Windows Update. It was refusing to run. Well, it would run, but it would then stop with an error code that doesn't exist according to either Help or the the MS Knowledge Base. I eventually found it in the TechNet Forums. Apparently, Windows Software Update Service on Windows Server 2003 patched to current is broken for Vista, and if you have a policy assigning machines in an OU to a WSUS server, unlike XP, which will fall back to hitting Microsoft if it can't update locally, Vista simply refuses to update and issues an undocumented error code. I tried plugging the box in to the visitor network and running it. That was an exercise in frustration, since it then refuses to run telling you that you need to be on the network with the WSUS server and issues an undocumented error code (but at least this one comes with a useful message and not just a random hex code all by its lonesome). I'm still pissed off over this. I have users who disappear for six weeks at a time. They won't have access to the WSUS server. I want them to be able to get patches directly from MS when they're not in the office. Not with Vista! They can either get WSUS updates, OR MS Update hosted updates, but not both, depending where they are.
Vista can create processes it can't kill. I let my machine attempt to turn itself off for 20 hours. In the end, I had to hard power it down. It took a while to isolate what service was refusing to die, and why. XP can kill anything from the Task Manager. It's not recommended to kill a specific process (ending the application is the recommended), but I've never met one that couldn't be killed if necessity demanded it.
While I like the look of Vista, the new Start Menu behavior is annoying. I'll get used to it, but if you want to see your games, don't tell Vista to use the classic menu. I had installed NWN2 just to see how it would run in a shiny new machine. It still bogs down at any resolution over 800x600 with all the visuals maxed, and even at 800x600, I wasn't able to totally turn everything all the way up, but that's an NWN2 thing, not Vista. No, the annoyance with Vista is how the "Games" menu works. I had a single icon for NNW2 under the Games menu. Not a NWN2 nested menu, just the icon to run the game. Reverting to classic, even that disappears. Where's my NWN2 folder dammit? What if I want to run the Toolset? What if I want to pull up the ReadMe? No, all I get to do is play the game, and only if I use the new menu layout. Except, I went to look at the properties for the icon so I could copy it create my own in the classic menu, and hey, all that other shit is there as alternate context! That's actually kinda cool, and anything bearing the Games For Windows logo has to set this up properly by default apparently, but Vista was faking it for NWN2, since MS has included the knowledge of how to do this for several thousand legacy games with Vista ( I had to dig around to find all this out on my own. Which games? Only they know). However, some notice of this fundamental change would have been, you know, NICE. Here I am, looking for an NWN2 folder under Start -> Programs, and nope, it's nowhere to be found. I only checked Games because I had a sneaking suspicion of what the fuck had happened, but I expected to find a nested menu, as I said above, not a single icon, and not even having that under the classic menu, that just really annoyed me. Fuck you Microsoft. I shouldn't be FORCED to use your new layout, just to see MY fucking software. I've since formatted and reinstalled, so no more NWN2 on this box, but it was just to satisfy my curiosity that it even got installed in the first place, so no big loss there.
The Control Panel layout and behavior has changed, yet again. Some things have been added that should have always been there (Device Manager, on the Control Panel? What a great idea! Wait, didn't it DEBUT there on Windows95!?). Other things have been renamed and/or grouped. For no reason that I can grok, but I'm sure it makes some kind of fucked up sense to some code monkey who hasn't been out of his cube in ten years back at Microsoft.
I don't have to install TweakUI to disable Autorun anymore. There's an Autorun entry in the Control Panel menu. One check box, and Autorun is off. You can choose to leave it on and there's a whole slew of things you can assign options for if you choose to do so. As far as I'm concerned, Autorun is a gaping hole you can drive a Mac truck sized bit of malware through (see Sony), and I suspect one little GPO and I can disable it domain wide. Now I just want all the other parts of TweakUI available. Or for Vista to let me install the XP flavor. I want my focus follows mouse back. Now.
User Access Control is a nightmare. I'm sure you've seen the Mac commercial? It really IS that bad. Unlike OS X, which asks for an administrator password if you make CHANGES to system files or settings, UAC won't even let you look at them without confirmation. And it's not like it's adding security since it doesn't require a password, just click yes or no. Of course, some software installers puke and die if you don't have it turned on, because Oh My God, you can't REALLY not want it ON!!!!!!!!!!!11!!11!!!ELEVENTY!!
There's more, but that's all I'm up for getting in to right now.
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