Taking the plunge: Windows Vista
Prompted by an unknown issue with EA’s Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 causing it to crash to desktop, I set up a dual boot with Windows Vista where I found, to my surprise, that these games worked flawlessly. In fact, everything that I needed worked on Windows Vista. I was expecting the reverse problem where applications that previously worked on Windows XP SP2 would fail to work on Vista - removing UAC (User Access Control) seems to have alleviated this problem. Programs that I had anticipated would break under Vista did not. One example is Hamachi - a free peer-to-peer VPN client. Given the reworking of the entire Windows networking stack, I’d anticpated problems with this program but have found it to work absolutely fine.
I’m starting to think that, as I own a 8800GTX graphics card which is a DX10 card, that it was an issue relating to DirectX 9. This seems farfetched; but after several emails to EA Tech Support have come to nought, any seemingly logical solution will do me fine.
The move has been quite pleasant - I’m yet to experience the issues that everyone else seems to have been getting. In part, I suppose that every single component of this computer is new and been designed with Vista in mind. PC World reckons that level of problems with Vista is proportional to the age of the hardware - seems logical enough for me. I did previously install Vista onto my old P4 2.8 / Radeon 9600XT box and had several issues with it - one notable one being the inability to run Firefox. This box has since been relegated to being a server (the one that hosts this site that you’re reading).
The desktop UI is pleasant to use, and the improved Windows Explorer makes navigating through the previously tedious My Documents / Pictures etc folders easier. It also makes jumping between folder heirarchies very nice. Aero is slick to use, especially with hardware capable of dealing with the extra overhead that it was reasonably produce. Still, it’s obviously been plagarised from the Mac 
Currently in my 4th day with Vista, and loving it!
Still contemplating that Mac mini though….$818 (with Education discount). So…tempting.