Due to my laptop crashing I decided to take a plunge into Vista Ultimate. I tried to run my multi-core benchmarking tool Thread3r on it, and it works just fine. Below you can see it running on two cores. Notice the CPU metric sidebar gadget, indicating both CPU cores running at 100%:

There are plenty of Vista reviews out there already, so I'll just list my experiences briefly:

• I installed a retail version of Vista, which obviously does not come with drivers specific to my HP laptop. However, Windows Update automatically pointed me to a HP driver depot, which contained a detection program that listed all the specific drivers for my laptop, from Touchpad to Nvidia drivers. Impressive.
• I have a high-end laptop, so Vista performs well on it, yet the boot time is awfull compared to XP. It takes up extra disk space and memory too, and I have yet not found a reason why it should.
• I like the sidebar with their gadgets, even though you can do this on XP, I like having it integrated into Windows natively.
• Aero makes Vista look slightly nicer, but is a complete joke compared to Compiz/Beryl on Linux. Aero is particularly weak in 3D, all it offers is a 3D window switching feature.
• Vista comes with a backup feature that allows you to backup and restore your full system as an image. Very cool, saves me from using a 3rd party tool.
• I installed a virtual drive manager program that I use on XP. It crashed Vista with a BSOD. The system came in a completely unusable state and would boot up in the same BSOD even when running in safe mode. The image restore feature saved the day, but this is not acceptable. No program should be able to do this kind of damage. This also means some of your old software simply will not work on Vista, so far I've found two programs that I regularly use, but cannot run on Vista. No wait, not even Microsoft's very own Visual Studio can run without a major patch on Vista. Painful.
• Vista Ultimate comes with quite a nice share of extra programs, particularly strong are the new Media Center, DVD maker, and pimped up oldies such as Paint and built-in games.
• Although highly annoying, I think I'm almost used to confirming every single action that I take in Vista.
• There are some serious deficiencies in the way things are organized now. Some things that I could access with 2 clicks in XP now take 6 clicks. Poor.

Overall, I think I can accept moving to Vista over time, especially for a media system. There really are some improvements made, but a lot of things got worse too.  I'll try to keep an open mind to it, as always, and welcome the first service pack. The bottom line for now: unless you have a very specific reason to upgrade to Vista (i.e. DirectX 10 games), it is recommended to wait. In the meanwhile, I'll keep using Ubuntu and Vista together.

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