So in my last post, I ranted (well, tried to, but my rant got wiped out when Vista crashed) about what I didn't like about Vista. Now I'll rant about what I do like about Vista.
Task Manager and Resource Monitor
Both the Task Manager and the Resource Monitor (formally performance monitor) on Vista received a much needed revamp. The fact that task man now allows you to go to one place and see all your running programs and services, and even allows you to start/stop services from within the task man is a huge improvement. And with perfmon, being about to see at a glance what is going on with your CPU, disk, network and memory is awesome! While the old perfmon was OK, the fact that you had to 1) add all those things separately and then try to discern one from another because they were all overlayed on one graph was kind of a pain.
Animations / Eye Candy
In ALL previous version of Microsoft Windows, the first thing I would do is turn off ALL the animations, I always found them to be annoying, distracting, and a waste of my time. But I've found the animations and eye candy with Vista to actually enhance the experience of using the OS.
Start Menu
The start menu in all previous versions of Microsoft Windows was always a jumbled mess of applications, and God forbid you had more than a dozen or so applications installed, your start menu would become just unwieldy. I used to organize all my programs by type, Internet, Utilities, Audio & Video, and Development to try and tame the mess that was the start menu. Now, it really doesn't matter how big a mess it becomes, the fact that I can press the Win key and start typing makes the whole thing more manageable, and a heck of a lot easier to use.
Programs and Features
The abomination that was formally Add/Remove Programs has finally been fixed! As a developer, with all the software I had to have installed, it would take several minutes for the Add/Remove Programs dialog to come up and populate. Now, it pops up right away, and starts populating. I haven't had it take more than 10-15 seconds for it to fully populate with all my programs! And, it even tells me down at the bottom that I have 101 programs installed, for a total of 9.57 GB of space. Pretty handy. That fact that I can sort all my installed programs by size is really nice as well.
Overall
Overall, when I can get Windows Vista to not lockup, I'm happy with it. If things continue the way they have been today, I think I'll stick with Windows Vista. I can say though, that game performance is pretty crappy. I'm getting a solid 10-15 frames per second less in Half Life 2 :(