Vista - First Impressions...

Quick Showdown:

Old Computer - Pentium 3 866Mhz with 256MB SDRAM, Windows XP Professional

VERSUS

New Machine - AMD 64 Dual Core with 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, Windows Vista Home Premium

Positives for Vista...

• Search Feature is intuitive and finds what you want.
• Sleep Mode is quick and lets you boot fast
• Haven't found the hot-key for the Aero windows yet, but that may come in handy soon
• RSS reader built into the desktop is sweet, as is slide-show feature
• Management of pictures/music/videos/documents is taking some time to figure out, but I like the new navigation and tags
  

Negatives...
The Mac commercials nail these right on head - the "UAT" prompts me anytime I try to run a process that connects to the internet or makes adjustments to my computer (this can be overridden), 2 of my 3 external devices were unsupported, lots of bloat-ware running in the background, but so far my setup has no problems processing it all.

Expectations...
It feels faster, but not as fast as I expected - 8 times the memory, 4 times the processing power, but my new Vista machine runs just slightly faster than my old super-clean XP machine when running day-to-day apps like Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, etc. Granted, there are a ton of Vista processes running in the background that could be stopped. The real stunning part is video rendering - what took me 7 hours now takes 7 minutes, and ripping my Tivo files to DVD is super-fast (video editing was but a glimmer in the eye of my old machine). So this performance has won me over, even though it may have more to do with the new PCs awesome specs than the actual OS.

Supported Devices
Good story here - my internal Wireless G card and my internal hard drive were not supported by Vista. Both are less than a year old. And to top this, when Vista tries to redirect you to the "Unsupported Devices" web page, the page told me that my browser (FireFox) was "unsupported" by the "Unsupported Devices" web page. I may have just entered into an infinite loop of unsupportable insupportability.

Conclusion
The new look and features are worth the change, so if you have enough memory (2GB in my application) I say go for it and upgrade to Vista. You can get an upgrade disc for about $60 if you catch a sale. Plus, it's always good to know your way around the most current operating systems.