Reply #23: I like it a lot as well.

[B3Nut]

I have Ultimate on a desktop I built, and Home Premium on my new HP laptop. The only real "gotcha" I've had was due to Norton on the laptop messing up the Windows networking (it seemed to block NetBIOS discovery no matter what I did with its firewall.) I yanked the supplied Norton off and installed AVG Free (my favorite antivirus, it's fast, small, stable, and free!) and all was well.

I still run my XP box (ProTools isn't Vista-ready yet) and my digital photo work takes place on that machine as well. I also run a Windows 2000 Server machine for file and print services on my home network, and I'm beta-testing Windows Home Server (it's really neat!) Most of my work builds are XP as the point-of-sale and business apps the boxes I build need to run are still XP-only (not to mention point-of-sale hardware drivers.) But my boss and I both really like Vista for our home machines, and I like it better than OS X as well (my affection for the Macintosh started waning after OS9 went away, I just can't warm up to OS X at all, even though I work with it regularly.)

There is an awful lot of FUD out there...no, Vista won't eat your existing mp3's, and the HD DRM only kicks in when you're viewing a high-def DVD or Blu-Ray disc. As long as your video card and monitor/TV are HDCP-compliant (most new ones are now) you'll be fine, assuming you'll even be using the computer to view hi-def content. If you want to blame anyone for that scheme being in place, blame Hollywood, since they're the ones that dictate the conditions of licensing the HD playback technologies. Apple will have to implement the same thing if they want Macs to play back HD-DVD or high-def Blu-Ray content. Personally, I think the makers of playback technologies should band together and tell Hollywood to go to hell, but that's me.

Todd in Cheesecurdistan