I recently bought a new laptop at Best Buy that came preloaded with Vista Home Premium.
Here are my initial observations while using it:
•Best Buy has an entire "Vista Personalization Worksheet" that must be completed on the sale of any machine that has Vista. What this really means is they try to sell you a bunch of crap that you don't need. They also want all your personal information. Not sure if this is a Microsoft thing or a Best Buy thing but I told the sales guy that if they tried to sell me a bunch of stuff I didn’t want or need that I would just leave. All I want is the laptop and that is it. His response was “I hope you aren’t planning on getting on the internet then.” Meaning that I would need to buy all the stuff they sell to keep me safe.
•Do you use OWA (Outlook Web Access)? Chances are that it won't work on Vista. Not sure whether it is a problem with IE7 or Vista or both but I cannot use my OWA for work. The support stuff I have seen says you need to upgrade the Exchange server. Sure…no problem. Because upgrading an Exchange server within a huge organization is a no brainer.
•The laptop shipped with about 7,000 systray applications. Everyone needs their marketing software to show up in the systray. This is no different than any other OEM. The difference is that this time, the crappy software is installed on a new platform which they are unfamiliar with. Perfect example; when you launch Vista you get the "Welcome Screen". This screen shows you all the stuff that you would want to do on a regular basis. Some of the OEMs even have their own marketing software stubs in here. Well, when you uninstall their application, it doesn't remove it from the Welcome Screen. So you are left with a bunch of the giant generic icons that aren't shortcuts to anything since the application was removed. Nice.
•I was copying about 4 GB of pictures to the vista machine and it wanted to "insert" them into the file structure. When I did that it reported that it was going to take 12 hours. I stopped it and copied the files to the end of the list of existing files and it copied in minutes. Something funny with the way Vista organizes and indexes files going on here. For the common user, this is just going to frustrate the heck out of them and make Vista appear to be very slow.
•Nothing appeared faster. In fact, it seemed common tasks too much longer than they did in XP.
•The nifty window cycling thing that Mac OS does takes forever to work in Vista. So much so, that it makes that feature useless in my opinion. It’s neat-o but that is it. I can’t imagine using it in any real world situation.
•I was surprised that it actually shipped with the OS install disk. I was able to install Vista from scratch without any crappy OEM software. A big bonus for me and probably the single best thing I can say about the laptop.
Never has an OS been created that had so little thought about what the end users of the product actuall need and want. Microsoft spent tons of time and energy developing a platform that will be able to deliver Hollywood's content to your machine. This OS was created to sell you more product. They didn't create an OS for the users that happened to enable these features. These features were the point. The fact that is does some stuff for the end user is secondary.
Microsoft has been saying that these "protections" only apply to "premium" content. Well this simply isn't true. All drivers that involve the display and audio subsystems need to updated. Just look at the problems that nVidia and Creative are having. This is costing them tons of research and development time. Guess who is ultimately going to pay for that? You guessed it...we are! Additionally, when the code for your drivers is now doubled to handle all of the "protected" content, you now have twice as many places for problems as before. How is this more stable? And these drivers are used whether you are playing "premium" content or not.
My conclusion is that I wouldn't buy Vista as a stand alone OS. I would even have hesitations to buy it preinstalled on a new PC. My guess is that there are going to be a ton of issues with games and other apps…from driver support to performance. My advice would be to stay away from it for as long as possible. As a side note, OEM versions of XP are about $80 and Linux is still free.