Mycanid said:
If your laptop is a tablet I have heard that the tablet functionality in Vista is much better....
Handwriting recognition is better. On the other hand, there isn't an update for the button (screen rotation, etc.) driver for my older tablet. Battery performance seems comparable, as does overall speed, but I had to tweak the power usage a bit.
For my shiny new desktop, Vista seems overall pretty fast. I like the navigation changes a lot and Aero is kinda cool looking. Most applications seem to work fine and I've even gotten Visual Studio to run well enough (it requires some admin priviledges, which runs contrary to the tightened down Vista model). A bit of tweaking was involved to get Civ 4 to run correctly, though some of that was because Civ 4 assumes a standard ratio monitor. The biggest pain, so far is that I absolutely cannot get Campaign Cartographer 3 to install under Vista. PCGen runs quite well, though.
My general thought on Vista is that it's a nice OS and I wouldn't shy away from getting it, especially if you're reasonably computer literate (or will be running only apps/games made for Vista). On the other hand, it isn't worth spending the money just to upgrade. I also wouldn't go for just Home Basic -- make sure you're getting Home Premium.
Eventually, there will be a catalog of games and apps that are either made for Vista or can be patched to work better with Vista. At that point, I'd do the upgrade for sure. That day ain't today, so expect the occasional glitch, especially with older titles.
Office 2007, on the other hand, rocks whether you're on Vista or XP.
