Just for curiousity, I downloaded the Microsoft compatability test to see if my computer would run Vista. The computer had no problems, BUT my antivirus, Bitdefender is not compatible, Zone Alarm Pro has problems and my old Adobe Reader also has problems. There were other compatibility problems also, including with Java.

I had guessed this would be the case. I can assure everyone that Vista will NOT be on my product list for the near future. If it takes as long to sort out the Vista problems that as it did to sort out the XP problems, we are probably looking two or three years in the future. For the past six months or so my Windows XP Pro has been working quite well.

Microsoft offers several different Vista packages. Reading through them, I didn't see anything that was of obvious benefit to me.

hi'

yop, me too, bitdefender needs a patch

lucky kerio is fine...

but too many updates to make, they could have at least check a bit more ...

deamon tools isn't compatible, I wonder why?

francois

ps; and my XP works fine

thanks bill :D

So far everything looks like its gonna work. I'll keep Windows 2000 on a partition of my unix machine just in case I run into problems though.

In my opinion the major drawback would be a quite big performance loss...

I ran all the beta versions and RC versions, and they all ran like a dog, including the last RC...

This is on a 64bit AMD machine with 2 gigs of ram, but with a rather basic PCIe graphics card (Geforce 6600 with 256mb ram).

Browsing the benchmarking tests of all the major PC magazines seems like they pretty much all concurr.

Many of these benchmarks admittedly are just some numbers, where an average user would not even notice a drop of 25% in speed during normal use.

I just found the whole experience sluggish, from booting, to opening program etc...

There are some debuuging routines running in the background of the beta and RC versions, so things might improve with the first comercial release, but I guess it won't be that much faster.

Steve Gibson recently ran security tests for Vista on an episode of Security Now and said that on a P4, "Vista flies". The AeroGlass feature is supposed to be a memory hog, but according to him, and other reviews, Vista running without the aero is not much hungrier than XP.

Considering the state of the art hardware now, against what was around when XP launched, I think Vista should do fine on most new machines as very little is shipping without at least a gig of ram, single core processors are on the way out, and Vista is capable of using thumbdrives as additional ram.