I've got Vista Ultimate on my new tablet PC. Aside from getting used to the security pop-ups and the differences in the Explorer interface for navigating the filesystem, I haven't really had any major complaints. You can avoid a lot of the hassle of the security popups asking for an admin password by simply running as an admin user all the time (though that kind of defeats the purpose). It is a resource hog, too, of course, but I have 4GB of RAM plus a 2GB SD card as a turbo boost cache, so I don't really feel that much pain performance-wise.

I just stuck the SD card in there today and told it to use it as boost cache, so I haven't really seen a noticeable difference yet. My understanding of the way it works is that it builds a cache over time of the most frequently accessed files, so I would have expected it to take a little bit of use to develop some kind of pattern of usage. I'm also running 32-bit, and it only recognizes 3.3GB of the 4 installed.

Think you missed the point of the class action Feyd.

I wasn't really commenting on the class action, as much as I was addressing the more general complaints about Vista. Personally, I bitched about Vista since it's release and resisted switching, even though I'd never used it and experienced its flaws and quirks first hand. While it's certainly been frustrating, I can't really say it's much more frustrating than XP has been. In fact, since my plan was to replace my desktop PC at home with my tablet, I hatched a plan to stick that desktop into a closet and convert it into a media server machine that would allow me to use my XBox360 as a Media Center Extender. Despite the hardware being at least 2-3 years old (a dual-core 3GHz Intel chip on an Abit mobo with a GeForce 7600GT graphics card... hardly top-of-the-line any more), a clean install of Vista Ultimate went off without a hitch. Under XP I had an enormous headache installing the OS because of the required drivers for the onboard SATA RAID controller... Vista recognized everything without pause. I didn't have to manually install a single driver for any component, it was all handled by the installation and subsequent Windows Updates.

On the other hand, I was considerably less reluctant to upgrade based on the fact that I had access to someone with access to the Microsoft Employee's Store who could get me a full copy of Ultimate for $50. If I'd had to pay full price, I probably would have dragged my feet a little, and more than likely would have just gone with a Home Premium Upgrade (making the upgrade process most likely a little less easy).

I've long been a Micro$oft critic, but I'm coming to the realization that they're starting to do things better. In addition to Vista, I've picked up OneCare Live to provide my home network with virus/malware protection and it controls all kinds of stuff in the background for me, like disk defragging, automated backups (even automatically identifies shared storage on the network and asks if you want to back up each computer to it) and printer sharing. As much as I'm technically proficient, I don't really have a desire to spend a lot of time fooling around with my computer(s) - I just want them to work the way I want them to, and Microsoft seems to be figuring out that that's what a lot of people want, not just computer idiots, but people like me who screw around with computers for a living and the last thing I want to do when I get home is to have to be tweaking and fixing my own computer.

All that said, I've also just recently bought my mother-in-law a MacBook Pro when she insisted she needed a laptop, and I plan to buy my wife an iMac in the near future, largely because of the simplicity of those platforms. It's been a struggle with the mother-in-law, of course, as anything computer-related is, because she insisted she needed to be able to play a particular Windows game on whatever laptop she ended up with, so I bought and installed Parallels and and created a Windows XP virtual machine for her. She kept insisting that she needed McAfee installed in XP on her MacBook, and I couldn't figure out why... Come to find out she starts up the MacBook, goes into the XP VM, and then uses that to browse the internet, rather than just using Safari and the Mac mail client in the primary OS. I predict I'll be instructing her on this several more times before it sinks in that Windows is not the only way to use a computer. As it is, I ended up trashing that XP partition and recreating it because she'd managed (as usual) to get infected with one of those malwares that starts popping up windows promoting some anti-malware crap that's really just more malware... Unfortunately, that's something that happens with her a couple times a year... she thinks she's smart enough to solve her own computer problems and typically just manages to make them worse... I was hoping to avoid that by giving her a Mac, but I shot myself in the foot, I guess... :)