as a side note, upgrading to Vista is either

a) Very simple - 2 year old PC, all old components, only new ms s/w
b) Very very hard - new hardware. lots of new s/w

I had to share my pain

Point b involved:
Strip out old hardware, replace with core 2 dua/ geforce 8800 gts (yipee).

Asus p5b mobo, creative audigy card (bit old), samsung dvd writer.

All this lot needed internet downloaded drivers/firmware.
But the fun came when a set of pinacle studio drivers killed the CD-ROM (which had never been found as a dvd). Enter driver hell and a trawl of the web to end up with a firmware patch and manual editing of the registry.

And all so I can have a new toy, here comes lotro (if they ever fix their logon servers) and dual display Supreme Commander.

amusingly, everyone I know here in the states that installed Vista on a machine has since removed it.

ya... which is one reason why I kinda wished the laptop I got didn't have to have vista come on it to start with... but, eh, laptop is a laptop for me

I...
Will...
Prevail...

So, months later, any luck?

All v stable now. The device drivers are all fine. So yes, it is now good. (apart from one video capture card).

I have 4 computers on my home network. 2 run Vista Ultimate and 2 run XP. The 2 with Vista came with it and are high end multicore machines with top of the line graphics and extensive multimedia including HDTV.

All run fine. I do not recommend trying to upgrade an XP machine due to driver issues.

Vista runs WoW fine and actually runs LOTRO better than XP does. DX10 is awesome. I love LOTRO by the way

I have a very fast internet connection (13 MBPS) which may help Vista. While XP can do full screen multimedia with only 1 shudder every 5 min or so Vista can run full screen HD video smooth as a HDTV system.

Vista has more overhead than XP but makes up for it by better utilization of multicore processors.

Overall I give Vista a grade of B which is pretty good for a Microsoft product, most of which are rubbish.

Ah, that explains why so many people I know hove complained about Vista! (While at the same time a few said it was wonderful.) The former were all upgrading from XP, rather than getting a machine where Vista is the default.