I have been running Vista now for about one month and although there was problems from the start, for example All USB devices wouldnt work on PC while of course on Windows Xp they worked no problem i was beginning to like it.
About 95% of the programs i use regularly run fine on Vista but any piece of hardware you have thats old may not work at all on vista as i found out. Vista lacks alot of support for certain drivers and devices and probably will for a long time.
It looks nice and seems to run a little bet better than Xp and of course it has DirectX 10. Now it was the Directx 10 part that got me interested being a huge PC Gamer and owning a few Dx 10 Games like; Crysis,Flight Simulator 10, Assasins Creed and Halo2. With the exception of Halo 2 which looks so dated for a game thats Dx10 only and came out in 2007. While DX 10 is the next big thing unfortunately its just not really worth the hassle of Vista at the moment.
Windows Vista is fine if all you want to do with it is play Dx10 games anything else and your asking for trouble. Apart from the inital USB problem after a few Windows Updates everything was running fine and USB was working again. The real problem with Vista as i painfully found out is that any software that uses drivers to run will probably have problems.
Sony Ericsson PC Suite
For example i recently was given a Sony Ericsson k800 phone and the software to transfer files to it works perfectly under windows Xp but with Vista it was a nightmare to get it to work. I managed to track down the lastest version of the “Sony Ericsson PC Suite 3.2” and even though it claims to support vista i had many problems getting it to work. In the end i did and it just doest work as well as it does under XP but thats to be expected.
Peerguardian 2
A popular Bit-torrent tool to stop certain IP addresses being able to see what your downloading does not work on Vista yet and again there is a Vista version but after many restarts and fiddling around it still wont work.
Now while both arnt critical applications they really show how bad Vista support is. Sure Vista SP1 is about and it may or may not fix the problems i had but i cant help but wonder if its worth the bother and it really isnt. Even a program im still developing in visual basic 6 which works fine on Windows 98-Xp has problems in vista at the moment im trying to track them all down and fix them even though they are little problems its still the same old story.
Windows Vista Stability is quite good, i havnt had any major crashes or “Blue Screens” i had at the start when i installed vista but everything is fine now. But using Vista seems to be like the using Windows Xp x64 (the 64 bit version) not many do and the support and compatabilty is bad.