Yes I have tried VISTA via the beta programme (up to RC1) and wasn't that impressed. It certainly isn't worth the cost of upgrading to me.

As far as I can tell there is a lot of eye candy which does slow the system down (benchmark testing has shown that Vista is slower than XP which was slower than 2000 ....).

People have said that the graphics is accelerated in hardware and so don't impact on performance - fair enough if you are using a word processor but if you are doing video rendering etc. it will have a big impact - GPUs have limited cycles to play with just as CPUs.

It's funny how every release is described as improving performance when all benchmarking in recent years has shown that successive generations of all OSes seem to be getting more and more bloated and as a result slower.

A previous comment that "this is an OS - a means to an end" is spot on - all the manufacturers seem to have forgotten this - if I want applications to catalogue photos etc. I will install something like ACDsee which does a heck of a lot more - and probably more efficiently.

MS just keep adding toys to the OS (like Windows MovieMaker which was a pointless waste of disc space) and every time they do they push other companies out of the market and then end up in court with anti-trust cases. When will the next batch of AT cases arise?

It is interesting that in the EU MS has responded to the anti-trust cases by releasing a version 'without Windows Media Player' - but guess what ... it is MORE expensive than the version with.

Also in the EU there is a huge price hike on US prices - basically no one in MS is bright enough to do currency conversion so in the UK there is a pounds for dollars price match which means Vista costs twice as much in the UK.

If I had the option to use Linux I would - though I don't really find Linux a panacea as it so hard to get lots of hardware to work properly and it is difficult to find professional quality equivalents of a lot of graphics/video/audio software available to Windows and Mac users (plus the expense of dumping expensive software to look at inferior alternative under Linux).