Well, not mine... picked it up at best buy for work though and gave it a couple hours of just screwing around.

It's better than I thought it would be and I most certainly will get a vista box. It looks like it was built on the XP platform and basically that it's XP underneath for the most part, with all kinds of graphical options up front. You can adjust everything to look like 9x systems, everything still has the "classic view" as an option, and msconfig, cmd (and all commands i tried) worked.

I'm not a fan of "cute" things as I prefer performance over it but vista's graphics are pretty futuristic, even on the minimal video card. Looked pretty bad ass on a VAIO screen. The little gadget thing (copied from mac) is pretty cool as well... the built in gadgets are pretty cool and I'm sure there will be a million third party bad ass things to do with this.

As far as 32 bit applications (I was using 32bit Home Premium), I was able to load a few programs that ran fine, however a database tool that is used for iseries servers wouldn't work.

The thing that gets me... the kid at best buy said all of the laptops had home premium and that none had business or ultimate except a $2300 one. I need one of those for one feature; to join a domain controller. He said that I could upgrade from home premium to business for $50, however the only thing that I could find in windows marketplace was the full business upgrade for $199... I then went to newegg, $150 for OEM full... hm, obvious choice there. I'll be loading business soon along with office 07 probably... but so far, I like it much better than I thought I would.

that it's XP underneath for the most part, with all kinds of graphical options up front.
I bet they even threw in more bugs!

lol oh i bet... I'll wait a few months to get one in my house...

They told me to build me, buy, or have this hardware contractor to build me a nice vista machine... I don't want to break them though.

Must haves:
Core 2 duo, 2gb ddr800, + vista ultimate... And a video card that supports Windows Aero... hpefully within the next week.

Zero wears mittens... just thought I'd throw that out there

roflllllllll stfu bitch... my mittens are hot...

GET BACK IN THE KITCHEN WENCH.

yeah like DX9 and older games not having sound support

yay fun!

I had vista for all of 3 days before I went back to XP

I'm not touching vista for a looooonnnnggg time.

Another day of usage:

First boot this morning, doing nothing at all, explorer.exe crashed and had to reload... what a surprise right? On a 1 day old (only 1 program installed) system. 1 GB of RAM, 60% is taken upon initial loading by all of the windows services and extra sony shit... may do a clean install of the OS or put XP on this thing to make it useable.

3 out of 4 programs that need to be "installed" to work wouldn't work with vista. All stand-alone exe's run fine though. I downloaded about 10 new gadgets and I have to say... upon first look the gadgets look like they'd be annoying, but some of the tools are extremely helpful/cool.

Vista's version of outlook express, Windows Mail, is better than the traditional outlook express and pretty much has the same exact interface as Outlook 2003, except you can't hook to an exchange server... GAY... just a marketing tool to make you buy office if you need exchange.

If you're looking for some cool looking shit that will make people go "wow, that's hi-tech" you may want to consider Vista... but if you desire performance over BS (i do) stick with XP for the time being. I hope to have a vista box at home sometime this year though.

I'll update as I learn more/get more experience with it... I assumed some people would be interested considering several were considering upgrades.

a preloaded Sony system for a work environment? You should have loaded it from scratch after you got it.

My dad just bought a new HP and the amount of crap installed is insane.

yeah, no shit. I *really* wish I had wiped this machine before I started using it... garageband alone has several GB of shit on this disk. I've done that with all my other machines, and now I realize how important that is.

Does anyone know if its possible to boot into Vista using Boot Camp on a Mac?

do u use any MAC machines? how would u compare them to vista? idk what to get yet