Well, I did it. I installed Vista RTM onto all but one of my machines (that one needs to stay a Windows 2003 server for testing purposes). To tell you the truth, I wasn't too thrilled about installing the big V on any of the machines, but boy am I glad I have. The reason was that I've been on the Vista boat even before Beta 2 and man...it's been some rough sailing. RC1 was even a little rough for my tastes and I was scared to see what would happen with RTM. I have been pleasantly surprised as it seems a lot of performance issues have been resolved and my nc6000 feels as fast as a fresh install of XP, but it's running Vista loaded down with a lot of junk from it's former XP life.

On my laptop (an HP nc6000), Vista took nearly a millenium to upgrade from Windows XP Pro SP2. But it completed almost flawlessly (MacDrive barfs and refuses to uninstall since it doesn't think it'll run on Windows Vista). Not only does my laptop start up faster, but even during the post-password entry throws of launching all 900 of my startup apps, my computer is still pretty responsive. This is quite the departure from my XP experience in which I needed to treat rebooting like a 20 minute break (hence I HATED to reboot and would loathe the POS software that forced my hand in the matter). Now my reboots are less painful.

Also I notice that my slow ass notebook hard drive no longer gets the better of the OS and brings it to a grinding halt. I don't know what they did under the hood to fix that pain in the ass, but I salute the hardy soldiers developers that braved that battle field.

IE7 is much improved...so much so that I am considering uninstalling Firefox. What? Blasphemy you say? Well...who needs it when you have IE7's awesome tabs (finally) funtionality, phishing filters, and even the uber cool quick tabs view (take that Mozilla). Also I've noticed that FF 1.5.whatever has been very unstable in that it seems to stop loading pages after 20 or so minutes of use. "Whadap wit dat?" Anyway, FF is safe for now, but gets less and less use these days. Yes I know I know..extensions. I like them too, but hey they leak memory like the hole in the side of the titanic.

What's this? Windows Photo Gallery? Oooooh. It's like iPhoto, but on Windows. Very nice (and hauls major ass). It's now the heart of the Suriwong family photo empire. Try it, you'll really really like it.

Did I mention Windows Live Mail Desktop (someone, please call the naming police...4 words to name a product IS BAD)? Aside from the horridly long name, it's actually a decent piece of software that improves on Outlook express and kicks Thunderbird's ass in the spam filtering department. I've been getting ebay, jcpenny, and walmart spam among others nonstop for weeks. I mean these things got through Gmail's spam filters even though I marked them as such every single f'in time I got them. They eventually arrived in my thunderbird mail box and I have diligently declared these as spam to no avail. Why won't these pieces of crap recognize these as spam? As soon as I fired up Windows Live Mail Desktop...boom it got them. It told me that these were spam and put them in the junk folder. End of story. Good by Thunderbird. Gmail stays for now, but it's all going to WLMD now.

So what sucks with Vista? Not much yet. I haven't tried burning stuff (although there is a built in burning software now). I guess the only thing that rubs me the wrong way is the user account control that bugs you every time you want install, uninstall, change a system setting, make some coffee, etc. It's not as annoying as it used to be way back in Beta 2, but it's still there (I quickly shut it off).

There's a lot of neat goodies that are included that I've yet to try, but will surely get a chance to sooner or later (movie maker, calendar, meeting space, etc.). Like all things shiny and new, I hope the honeymoon never ends, but I'm jaded just enough to know that Vista will break my heart somewhere down the line....let's just hope it's not too soon.