My experience of Vista got off to a bad start... on testing a beta version it wiped one of our workmates 200gig drives... after that we never touched it till the full version came out...
on trying that we found there were a few bugs, especially when running soundacards, as MS released vista without completing the Upmix feature for most standard onboard soundchips. So there we were with our glorious 5.1 channel sound system, and only 2 speakers were working.
after the first 10 hours we were impressed with the way vista managed the networking, and found it to be much more efficeint at transferring files across switches. Its true vista requires a lot more, but after a few weeks on it you'll see the diffrence once you have to go back to using windows xp.
For multimedia vista gets a big thumbs up, also for its security and stability. However at this stage it hurts many gamers at their core by being power hungry and reducing frame rates.
One great configuration tip i found was to stop the search service from starting up automatically.
Lets just hope Microsoft learn from the errors they have made...
