I recently purchased a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (the OEM version). For the princely sum of £140, I now have a fully-fledged copy of the latest-greatest OS.
I installed it over the weekend, and so far, so good. Most of my hardware is either supported anyway (Printer, Motherboard drivers, etc), the XP Drivers work (Laser Printer, Webcam), or there’s specific Vista drivers available (nVidia graphics and Creative X-Fi). Most stuff works very nicely, and it all toddles along nicely. The only ‘problem’ I’ve had has been with the sound card. The Creative drivers are VERY beta still. I’m getting a lot of stuttering and distortion at random times. According to the Creative forums, the new driver architecture in Vista is very different, and very tight on its timings, which has made a lot of bugs in their code surface. I’ve so far tried two different drivers; one set I got from the Creative download site, the others I found linked from the forum. The drivers from the forum are newer, and definitely better, although still not as stable as the XP drivers.
Adobe Reader 8 is a pain to install, but somebody has found a solution to that problem. Well, a workaround at least! On the whole, I’m quite liking Vista though. XP was definitely getting tired, and in terms of usability, things are moving on a little.
Also, I’ve yet to see a BSOD!
OMG, you bought Vista, someone administer 50cc’s of concentrated sanity! Stat!
Yeah yeah! :p I like new things, so bleh!
I’ve bought Vista Home Premium myself and I’m quite happy with it really.
The Acrobat Reader issue isn’t limited to just that though, it seems that all Adobe software has problems writing to anything in c:\users. They must access it in some odd way that Vista doesn’t like. I’ve had issues with it in Lightroom, Acrobat, Photoshop and Bridge.
Some games do much the same too. City Life does some really weird stuff with reading files and dies horribly. I’ve yet to play it!