yeah, the last 3 for me are a lot better than xp. as far as rebooting, the black screen and logo is just as long, but when the screen comes up, the system actually works. not chug along for a few minutes loading all the background stuff looking likes its done but really wasn't, like XP.

and stability, way better than XP on my machine. i can't recall a crash that has ever required a restart, just games to desktop and things like that... stuff that can easily be blamed on 3rd parties.

Not to mention when my Display Drivers failed (only once, ...was a fluke) it didn't Blue Screen my system. Just gave me an system tray balloon and kicked the display drivers back up. Gotta love how they don't touch the kernal now. Stability is 100% better for me

I'd also have to disagree with most that list. Even in the beginning with shaky driver support it was still solid for me. I'd say more stable and sure on it's feet if ever there's a problem; I mean if there is a prob it doesn't just fall over and die. Pickup for Vista support has I think been very quick too. Performance is even better than XP x64
Networking I suppose might depend what you use it for but I found setting up sharing folders and media amongst machines and internet was done in seconds and a few clicks to personalise how I want it.
Shut-down lightning fast and start-up about the same but a have quite a few more startup apps. And I haven't rebooted this thing all week
I found this interesting as well[qoute]"No other product on this planet gets released this way. Well except fruit that hasn't ripened yet."[/quote]
don't get around much I guess, just some pc games for example over the last year or two can show just how horrifying a condition some can be released in

Dunno about elsewhere in the world, but here in Oz I'm constantly seeing Dell, HP, Acer and Compaq ads for Vista machines with only 512mb RAM...of course they're gonna run 'like a pig', even with Home Basic installed.

This seems like almost a side topic, but I'm very pleased with Raxco's PerfectDisk. I tried a number of different defraggers,including the crappy one built into Windows and Diskeeper, and most of them seem to take almost literally days to clean up a relatively-small (160GB) hard drive. I've been using PerfectDisk 7 for a while now, and it will usually complete a full defrag in two or three hours.