I’ve been using Vista since RC2 and I have to say I rather like it. The transition from XP hasn’t been too painful but In truth I don’t know if it’s really worth shelling out the cash for.

These little problems I have to get off my chest first:

• I will be very happy when Video LAN get Vista compatible. At the moment the UI is forced to drop out of Aero when you try to play a video.
• The Windows Audio service likes to crash out once in a while which is kind of annoying. I guess it’s something to do with my nvaudio driver but I’m fully up to date with drivers and that. Anyone else getting that problem? Restarting the service sorts it out anyway.
• My ruby on rails install went mad. Rails decided to continuously write to Apaches error log for a few days and ate 12gigs before I saw what was going on. Don’t know if that’s a Vista only thing? Rails sucks anyway so I lost no sleep over removing that completely. I was only trying it out anyway. Why couldn’t somebody put php on rails instead? Never mind, that’s a rant for another day.
• My copy of Vista hangs at the last stage of shutting down too. That’s annoying.
• What’s also annoying is the sidebar. I don’t like it. It’s clutter. And sluggish. I can see how the average user will love it and fill it with widgets and rubbish till it bursts but it just doesn’t do it for me.
• The start menu seems to be dead slow when going through all the programs.

Now on the whole, it could be worse. These things will be worked out as Vista matures.

Now to get to my point, while I don’t see very much benefit from switching to Vista, I wont be dropping back to XP.

I like the Aero interface. At the end of it all Vista’s looks are what swing it for me. I know you can get some nice looks from shell enhancements under previous Windows versions, I’ve used a lot of them but Aero beats them for me anyway. But that’s it. My attachment to Vista is purely to its cosmetics. Outside of that my user experience is pretty much the same as it was on XP. Other than a pretty interface it hasn’t brought anything new to the table that would make me stand back and say “hey, that’s useful, I could have done that a long time ago”.

Has anyone else found anything in Vista they can say is truly useful or innovative?