The install itself only took 30 minutes, vs up to 2 hours with Windows XP. Far fewer questions to answer than XP.

The only glitches when the install was complete were that my wireless nic wasn't recognized and neither was the sound card built into my ASUS motherboard. After hooking up a patch cable and hitting Windows Update, both drivers were pulled back and without a reboot starting working.

During the install of my various apps, I ran into two issues:
- Acrobat has only a beta version of a reader for Vista, thought it works fine
- the Cisco VPN software I had doesn't work with Vista, had to find a beta version that works.
- for some reason the Cisco SSL WebVPN won't install and run, but I can use the above software

Now that I am up and running the free AVG anti-virus 7.5 software give an error when logging in for the first time. I can start it manually and it works fine. Overall, not too bad for a new OS.

It runs about as fast as XP did on my AMD 64 -3000 with 512 megs of RAM. Menus and the deskop are snappier, but there is a statelyness to how it runs.

Things I like:
- man the sidebar with the gadgets is neat. Having a clock, calendar, cpu meter, news feeds just all hanging around updating, instead of having to visit several sites.
- just pleasant, refined look to everything. Fonts, graphics
- can run in non-admin mode! And things work and prompt if they need admin privs

Things I don't like:
- the Media player shortcut icon is an ugly white and orange triangle
- though Vista supports running in a non-admin mode, it doesn't take the newbie user through creating an admin and non-admin account
- despite having a black taskbar, tons of windows have a baby blue border. Arg!