kryptonic: The vista beta can no longer be downloaded from Microsoft. It was only available for a limited time. The version I installed was extremely buggy. Every time I turned it on it detected a new network card and would install it without uninstalling the old one. By the time I was bored with it, I must have had at least 60 network cards installed when there was really only one. I still can't figure that one out... It probably had to do with VMWare in some way or another. Not only that... but it was very slow. I gave virtual machine 2 gigs of physical ram (out of 4 in the system total) and full access to the Pentium D on a sata2 disk. The VM host was XP and there were practically no services/programs running... disgusting.

Moira: Did you run right out and get XP when it was released? If so, do you recall having as many problems?

I tend to wait until the first service pack comes out before I'll use the OS. I've considered getting Vista and dual booting... but I don't want the same headaches that everyone else is having. I might order a PC with Vista OEM to play around with at work... but many of our third party apps have not been certified to work with Vista and I can't go there if I wanted to (which I don't...)

I remember when XP came out I had a lot of problems getting all my hardware to work and there were lots of incompatibility problems with the apps that I was using. After SP1 came out, most of those issues were taken care of.