I've been playing around with Vista for a week now. Overall, I like it. To be honest, I like it a LOT more than WinXP. I think the main reason for this is that I use my laptop a lot more lately than a desktop and Aero is a lot more laptop friendly than WinXP ever was. Anyway, here are some observations.
Start Seatch: I think this might be the single best new feature of Vista after Aero. You type anything into the thing, and it looks for what you want. Lets say you want "Network and Sharing Center." Start typing it in, by the time you get to "and," it'll find it. Let's say you want to change your mouse settings, type in "mouse." Do you want to open a folder you know is deeply imbedded somewhere? Start typing the folder name, it'll find it and show you what's in it. One really useful thing is "ncpa.cpl" which takes you to network connections. For some reason, I can't find it unless I use this.
UAC: For power users, it's annoying and I have mine turned off at the registry level so it won't constantly remind me that it's off. It is however, great if you have kids. A few weeks ago, I ran spyware scan on my kid's computer.... Dang thing found 40 some odd spyware things. UAC should prevent a lot of that of installing themselves. Furthermore, there's a built in parental control so you no longer need 3rd party software like netnanny.
Scaling desktop icons: If you hold down the control button and scroll with the mouse wheel, your desktop icons will scale. DAYAM this is a useful feature. If you work on a hi rez laptop with a 15" monitor running at 1680x1050, this is a welcome feature. I know you could resize your icons in WinXP too, but it was never this easy. Previously, you had to match the thing just right so it took up just the right amount of space and crap. In Vista, it scales to just the right size. BTW, this works in any window. If you want to enlarge the font on your browser, it works the same way. In a folder, same way again.
Files renaming: In WinXP, I always had file extensions shown. This however, was an annoying PITA whenever you changed filenames. You had to retype in the extension every time too. I never understood why MS didn't make it so that only the name portion was highlighted. Anyway, I guess enough people complained about this. Now when you hit rename, it only highlights the name and not the extension. You can still change the extension if you want, but it's no longer highlighted by default.
Dreamscene (only available in Ultimate): I know a lot of people will just say this is just eye candy and nobody needs it. I like it though. In case you didn't know, Dreamscene basically replaces your wallpaper with a movie. The default ones are thing like raindrops on the ground, flowers waving in the breeze and other nature things like that. You don't have to limit yourself with those though. Just stick a .mpg or .wma video in there and it'll play those too. Oh yeah, even if you don't like Dreamscene, the wall paper scaling feature has been much improved from WinXP.
SuperFetch: After the search thing and Aero, this is probably my next favorite feature. Basically, Vista uses background processes to learn your behavior. It studies which programs and files you use the most and at what times, and it preloads them into memory. There are times when I click an icon, and the the dang thing appears instantly. About time somebody came up with this.
Oh yeah, lemme just say, never get Vista Basic. Vista Basic is only capable of running on a single processor. For about $30 more, the Home Premium version can run as many cores or processors as you can stick in the dang thing. Since almost all new CPUs are at least dual core, it would be most annoying to not be able to use a 2nd core with your OS when you upgrade your
CPU.
I'll probably have some more stuff to add to this as time goes by. I plan to try out ReadyBoost as soon as I can get my flash drive back from my son. At the same time, I'll try out Bitlocker, which I think is very promising.