I installed Vista (Business Edition, for those who care) on my work computer this last week. I also installed Office 2007. Office is, without question, a huge improvement, especially considering that 2000, 2002 (XP) and 2003 were all basically the same. The interface is significantly different, so that will take a while to get used to. Some of the improvements are massive, though, such as the auto-configuration function in Outlook. I would love to know why it took until the 2007 version for this function to be implemented. It should have been available by Office 2000.

Back to Vista...

Vista looks good (the eye candy factor is pretty high). There haven't really been any performance issues. I'm running it on a laptop and it runs just as quick as XP did. I was surprised that almost all of my applications work, including Firefox. The only one that doesn't work so far is DameWare. That pretty much sums up the good stuff.

To me, it feels like a mix between MacOS, XP and AfterStep. The menus are a lot different, but under the menus it feels a lot like 2000/XP. A good example would be joining the computer to a domain. So far, the interface for changing the wireless settings is the worst of all. BUT if I had to pick a single feature that is almost unbearably bad, I would have to say that award goes to IE7. I've been giving IE7 a fair shot for a while now. Unfortunately, the more I use it the less I like it. Fortunately, Firefox continues to get better and better and works fine.

The bottom line: Vista and Office 2007 are good upgrades overall and will probably grow on me once I become more familiar with them: however, the fine print below the bottom line says that Microsoft is the devil and charges way too much for the product they provide.