Vista is a piece of cr4p.
- Security: It has the BEST security ever. Whenever I run ANYTHING that is not signed by Microsoft it asks me whether I really want to run it, as it can be a security risk. You know, even though I'M the one who started the app, Vista thinks I shouldn't use it. And that's where it ends. I wanted to run ATITool on startup, but I couldn't. Why? Because it wasn't signed by Microsoft. And instead of at least telling me something, Vista just decided on its own that ATITool on startup was not for me. I had to disable the whole "security" on Vista just to stop the annoyance of clicking "Yes" or whatever to every single app I run and to allow myself to add my own startup apps.
- Interface: Wow. A transparent blur. One that requires pixel shader 2 to run. Great. It looks ugly, and as a reward, needs hardware that exceeds the requirements of many games. It literally LAGGED when I resized the Windows Media Player window (which has a lot of "glass"). WTF? Vista was way better off with some simple transparency.
- Performance: While I can play FEAR on XP perfectly fine on pretty high settings, Vista stuttered the whole time on all medium settings. And don't even ask about OpenGL apps... ran like cr4p. ~40FPS on a simple rotating triangle (that I wrote in GL a while ago). ~6000FPS on XP. Maybe it was just an odd coincidence, but that was REALLY f*cked. And yes, I had all drivers updated to the latest.
- BLOAT, BLOAT, BLOAT! My applications only had ~20% of my ram to run with. WTF, 1 gig isn't enough for you, ow wittle wittle wista? How about 2? 4? Ok, I'll go blow my money on 4 gigs of ram so I can satisfy you... ~40 processes on fresh install... XP - 19.
Other than having DX10 compability (which's, BTW, features can be all done with the latest OpenGL WHICH RUNS ON ALL PLATFORMS...), it's literally worse than XP in practically all aspects.
Then again, maybe it has improved since my run of RC1. But I doubt it.