So I took some of my free time this afternoon to shrink my XP partition and install Vista.
It seems to have alot of shiny shiny shiny stuff, but not a whole lot has changed. Everything is just shiny, and is more or less reorganized.
In my opinion all of the graphical extras seem pretty unnecessary, especially considering owners of some older hardware can barely run Vista.
The install was the best part so far, Vista is stored on it's DVD as a generic image, the install disk is really a PE disk with the image on it. This opens up a whole new swath of tools not available before vista, such as the ability to pop open a command window before installation. Also the vista installation PE has native support for commanding your disks. Pretty neat.
The security alerts ( Allow or Deny anyone? ) are kind of annoying, it boots up a bit slower than my XP install, but other than that it seems to perform about the same as XP so far. According to some reviews and benchmarks comparing XP to Vista you will lose a couple of FPS on most games, and many FPS on any OpenGL based games.
Driver support seems to be much better than the initial launch, everything installed smoothly and without error ( Except the part where I tried installing XP drivers by accident
).
I'll report back in on this next week after I throw a new RAID 5 array at it.
Until then have some shiny screen shots: