A while back the hard drive in my desktop computer died, leaving me to purchase a new drive and re-install my OS.
I have a genuine copy of XP, but with all the talk of Windows Vista, I thought perhaps it might be time to upgrade.

Installing was quite easy, everything was smooth - and the installer looks and works very well.

I'm using a slightly underpowered AMD XP1800 with 1.5gb of DDR Ram and a reasonably new 5500-based 512mb graphics card. It scores a "Windows Experience Index" of 2.9.

Number one thing I noticed, it was slow, incredibly slow. Where Windows XP would take 1min to boot up, Vista took literally 4-5 before it was actually usable. Turning off some of the fluff helped somewhat (sidebar, aero), but still no where near as snappy as XP.

For a while, I guess a week, the interface was "so cool", however after the initial "wow" factor wore off, it's nothing too special - if you really want to, you can skin any O/S to look similar.

The Windows UAC (User Account Control when it's at home) is supposed to protect you from installing applications and any untoward intrusions, it's a sort of cool concept, but in my case, every time I went to install an application it would turn off my screens, turn them back on again and prompt me - very annoying (and I'm not alone it seems), possibly fixable, but not a good first impression.

Overall, it has some niceish things, but it feels like Windows XP 1.5 rather than something 'totally fresh and exciting'. I've gone back to Windows XP for the time being (since I already own a licence), it is very snappy, and Vista currently offers me no single feature that I would call "must have".