>>You probably think I'm going for some gullibility award, falling for Vista and Barack Obama in the same year <g>.
>
>What about the so called constant request for permissions. Is that for real, or is it also just smoke? As you may have guessed, being razor sharp and all, I haven't taken the plunge yet.

During the two weeks (last year) when I had the Vista on my laptop, I didn't mind the UACs; they were the usual stuff through which I went with every firewall. It's other stuff that annoyed me endlessly - like deciding to renegotiate the IP with the router out of the blue and decide that 192.168.0.xxx isn't good enough and all of a sudden impersonate something starting with 234 or so. I'd see the web, wouldn't see my desktop. It was also unable to negotiate a RDP connection with a W2003 server until I went through some very unintuitive setup (and had to google that first) to revert the connection to the previous protocol - after five years of development, one would expect it would be able to automatically detect a protocol, even though the other side, the W2003 server, was developed by their archrival.

The most annoying thing was, however, the GUI (!). It would invariably pop down: the new window was alwaysOnBottom, specially if it was a help window or a modal dialog. Happened too often, but not always (I figure there were still pieces of software which didn't conform to the new standards ;).

And, of course, the bloatware (specially the Symantec racket which takes forever and a half to remove), the one-way firewall (so if anyone manages to break in, it won't even bother trying to catch them when they take stuff out).

The laptop is presently happy with Ubuntu.