I do not like Vista. My customers do not like Vista. Most of them are downgrading computers received with Vista to XP. Looks like, Windows 7 has provided the massive improvement.

The bad:

Five years late, with an OS bigger than Mt McKinley. Bloated with the useless Aero interface, crapware, a security system called User Access Control that, in its attempt to prevent unauthorized access to the kernel, saddled you with an incessant amount of "do you really want to do this" popups that almost everyone who used it turned off or logged in as the admin, thereby negating its intended purpose.

Required more ram, expensive to purchase, nearly impossible to upgrade cleanly from XP, many apps wouldn't run on it, some hardware was incompatible, drivers sucked or weren't ready and it was buggy from the start.

So fucking good that most people who purchased a pc with this trash loaded downgraded to XP. Someone wrote a parody of the Vista for Dummies called Vista for Suckers. Nice call Bill.

The good:

I have been using this Operating system for almost 2 years with lot of patience. For sure you will need a powerful computer (I used it on Macbook 13.3 with 2GB). Vista comes with a lot of drivers so everything just works. The Vista on Bootcamp(mac) works like breeze. The Biggest problem is with the Performance, there were so many common operations like file Delete, Move will take forever. You also need to disable the annoying UAC(User Access Control) which is just a security overkill.

God I hate this stupid piece of crap. Trying to install software and guess what it doesn't work. Vista is supposed to be the latest and the greatest except for the crap part.

I give Vista 32-bit a 3 and 64-bit a 1. Vista just doesn't work as well as XP. The worst thing is, it's less inuitive when it should be more.

Meh, it's ok. A lot of unnecessary shit that comes with it though. Good if you can find the stupid stuff and stop them.

It's great! Windows Vista is a great Operating System! There's nothing bad about it, Microsoft is focusing on creating a great and stable operating system where "crashes" don't happen often! I'm using Windows Vista Home Premium right now. The beginning with the beta and the few months afterwords were a little choppy, but Microsoft did their homework and corrected the mistakes!

good GUI perfect for mainstream users but still got security glitches and minoe tweaks, patches must done regularly.

not near as bad as what people claim, but i expected a bit more features after a 5 year timespan.

I hear a lot of bad comments about it..but I personally like it a lot better than any of the previous versions of windows.  If you know half about what you are doing on a computer then this operating system really causes no problems and it's a real pleasure to work with when it comes to getting things done and done fast.  A very organized Operating System.

Ran it for about a month on a 3.0 ghz HP D530 w/ 2 GB ram. It was stable enough but considerably slower than XP pro on the same machine. Plus, if you're into tuning and tweaking, it seems to take a lot more keystokes and mousclicks to do the same thing as XP. Best I could say is I could "live with it" if I didn't have an option of putting XP on a machine.

  i think that vista just sold the look, i mean come on we all know that we just want to upgrade for windows aero. the features in vista are basicly the same in xp. the only thing is that pretty windows aero. and from what i read vista is still bugy. so if you have xp, dont upgrade for the look. i know of a program that changes the whole xp look to vista, its called a brico pack, and the site is called crystall xp. it is a awsome site. they actully have some other goodies for xp. so heres the conclusion, windows vista uis buggy and slow. dont let the the pretty look fool you.

love it has few bugs not bad enough to not upgrade I wont go back to xp because vista so muc more modern and high tech  vista uses memory opisite of xp and will use up whatever you got to make your system run faster so ont sit here say it uses alto memory when thats how it works now and thats better way to take advanteg of arger memory adress space weather gamer or surfing internet

Didn't like the fact the desktop interface looked like they'd ripped it right off an apple mac, apart from that, no complaints, nice if you like eye-candy but I hear it has some issues with CISCO routers, hopefully fixed by now though! Loverly interface for the desktop, very pretty graphics and widgets.

Disappointing;
The new Vostro from Dell came with pre-installed Vista. My usual approach is to load all of the software I use and then configure, a 15 to 20 hour process. I tried using the files and settings transfer and this just did not import or move most of my files. The programs that did transfer did not include my personalized settings. At this point I dropped back to the old install system, item by item. After setting up the new system, including getting rid of those d***ed nags that were popping up constantly I decided to use the disk cleanup function. D*** again; 20 hours down the drain. The program deleted over 66,000 files. All this with me looking at the screen with mouth agape; first round to vista. Obviously restore from the recycle bin did not work for this. I found an undelete program and set it to work. Unfortunately a few bits in most programs had been overwritten while groping around so I started reloading programs, second round to Vista. As I dragged files from my cloned hard drive the program kept flagging, insufficient memory, even though the files were only around a 300mb size. Now darn it, I paid for 2 GB just so this type of thing did not happen!!!! Now I begin to see a pattern, my programs, most, not all, need to have a Vista version to work. The new Vista versions of the programs, Zone Alarm for example, has missing details such as update progress windows. I guess these were rushed out to enable people to have something. Most drivers appear to be the same, a rush job. Some hardware doesnt have any drivers written for Vista as of today. There are quirks showing up. As I use the keyboard to step through the explorer tree in the left pane, the right hand pane does not update the contents of the folders unless I click on the folder with the mouse. I spoke to Dell tech support and requested a copy of XP to replace Vista and they informed me the Vostro 1700 is not compatible with XP. My new Gateway with XP may cross paths with the returning Dell. Goodbye, good luck Vista. I may revisit in another year but now, no. My fault, I usually allow an operating system to mature at least a full year, maybe two.

I bought a computer pre-installed with Windows Vista to try out for a couple days. In short, it was horrible. I had the Premium edition. My largest complaints are 1) Vista lacked correct drivers for things such as the video card. 2) the OS is far to memory hungry (even while the computer is doing nothing). 3) The computer was a notebook and Vista drained the battery ridiculously fast. Trust me, you do not want Vista. Stay away from it like the plague!

I'll agree with anarchist134107. Vista looks "pretty" but anything beyond that it's just no good. The almost constant interuptions with the "continue?" crapola is very irritating. If you dissable that feature it constantly tells you you are at risk. Wich is even more irritating. Security is nice but they went way too far with it in Vista. Not to mention more than half of my softwae (mostly games) are not compatible with Vista. Over the last few months I've managed to fix this and that and workout a few of the bugs, but over all I think upgrading from XP to Vista may have been a mistake for me.

More flaws than advances

Bought a new computer with Vista installed (no recovery disk) it replaced XP on another box who's MB blinked off... for ever. I have a laptop with XP and would not replace it with Vista, which is sort of like Norton, very intrusive, continually demanding you to do this or that before a program can run....that might be necessary for a power user, but for myself it is a continual nusence. It is stable--so far...but not fast even though I up graded to dual core.

windows failed on this like sony faild on the "ps3" all the os is good for is being pretty their is no use of such a crappy system out their your freindly neighborhood anarchist peace love and anarchy

Honestly I think this is a great OS for what it is at the moment. I just recently upgraded my home built computer to this from XP about two months ago, and I haven't had any problems or crashes with it, at least not any more than I did with XP (which is quite a feat considering it's much younger than XP).

I really wish that the reviews on this site went back to when XP had first come out because you would be able to see that people were saying the same (and worse) things about it when it was released, and now it is generally considered the most stable Windows OS ever.

I've seen quite a few people run this and have no problem. Hell, I've seen a guy run Vista Ultimate (with Aero) on a P4, 1 GB of RAM, and 7600 GS. Sure, it's not the fastest thing in the world, but it still runs it pretty nicely. Not to mention alot of people I know who bought computers with Vista pre-installed have had no problems. The only people who I've ever heard of having problems are system builders, yet there IS a cheaper, undocumented version of Vista specifically for system builders. Out of the people who use that, the only prolems most of them have is a lack of decent drivers. Overall, the OS does seem stable, has alot less security problems then XP, and as long as your using the same bit version of Vista as you did with XP, it will most likely run alot of your programs. The only main downside is the price, the lack of stable drivers, and the lack of games to use DX 10. Still, I have still seen some performance boosts from people using it, plus the added security, and just the overall usefulness of it's new tools and such. I don't think I could give it anything higher or lower then a 4/5 right now.

Windows always has lots of problems when its fresh on the market. And this one is no different.

Another turd from Microsoft from all I've heard...

It works fine, but only of you have enough memory. I bought a new laptop, and it shipped with Vista. Luckily I was smart enough to realize that I should go with the 2GB RAM. Even though Microsoft claims that it work if you have 512 MB RAM, don't believe it. If I have everything closed except task manager, Vista uses at least 600 MB of memory at all times. Nothing that it does is that special. The default settings are ridiculous and make navigating through your hard drive as difficult as possible, luckily you can at least switch to classic windows setting for things like the Start menu. Unfortunately the new folder system is also rather convoluted. I love my new laptop, but it has nothing to do with the operating system. If I went back to XP it would be much more efficient.

Decent OS, but very bloated. However, after a few days of it running, it does get speedier. Very stable however, runs well on my Toshiba Satellite laptop.