Let's talk about Windows Vista

I'm using a legit copy of Home Premium on my laptop, from which I am writing this post.

I've been running Vista on this machine for a couple of weeks now and I've had a great experience with it thus far. It's extremely responsive, very fast, and very stable. I don't think I've had an application crash yet other than Explorer crashing a couple of times because it was trying to create thumbnails for .avi files and I hadn't installed the codecs yet.

I'm really falling in love with a lot of the built-in stuff like Windows Photo Gallery. Sure, it isn't as fancy as some of the more expensive third-party programs, but for someone like me who just wants to upload/organize photos, it's a dream come true. I haven't used Windows DVD Maker yet, but I'm glad to see some native DVD support at last.

The rewritten network interface is awesome, for real. It generally takes me under 3 or 4 seconds to connect to a network completely (way faster than in XP).

Other thoughts:

Vista is similar to XP, but in many ways it's a totally new OS. Some applications aren't going to be compatible with it, or are going to have bugs, and that's just something we have to deal with. Things can't be totally backwards compatible forever because eventually it's going to get in the way of new concepts or programming. Mac had to do it when OS X came out, now it's our turn with Vista.

Overall, I'm having a great time with Vista, and I would definitely never go back to XP as my primary OS.

Jam it back in, in the dark.