I downloaded Vista from TechNet on Thursday, and just got around to installing it on another partition on my laptop on Saturday. It's running pretty well so far, aside from a strange compatibility warning on login concerning an audio-related utility. It's only weird because I didn't load any special audio drivers or anything. Whatever it's using is what Vista loaded. I tell it to continue and the audio stills works. I went to Realtek's web site and downloaded the latest Vista driver for their HD audio, but it's still listed as being for the RC version of Vista, and although installing it stopped the warning dialog, it also killed the audio output completely, so I had to uninstall it and let Vista reinstall its own version again - which brought back the warning dialog. Oh well, I guess I can't expect much until Vista is released commercially.

Why do developers make changes just for the sake of change? Right-click on the desktop and there's no Properties selection to modify the Display properties. Deleting a file now seems to take three times longer than in XP, with two dialog boxes to acknowledge instead of one, plus you have to wait for the animation during the delete to complete. A lot of the new look of Vista seems to mean that familiar features have gotten moved or renamed or maybe even eliminated completely. Control Panel's Classic View" is a mess, containing some three dozen applets, again, with some renamed, making them harder to locate. "Add Or Remove Programs" is gone, renamed to something else. The new UI features may be nice, but I'm annoyed that I have to waste my time learning how to do the same things I was doing just fine in previous versions. Moving features around and renaming them and then selling it as a "new" operating system isn't progress. It's just greed.