Just so not everybody is offering a dissenting opinion:
I upgraded to Vista on my machine. Vista was free for me (in fact, for unrelated reasons received a free copy of Vista Business and a free copy of Vista Ultimate).
I would not ever want to go back to Windows XP if I can help it.
However, some major caveats:
My machine is quite modern, under a year old and cutting edge when I got it.
I would not recommend that even experienced users install it themselves. Too much of a pain in the ass, at least until there are updated drivers for some things.
I don't like what they've done to the start menu. Instead of flying out, it shuffles around in a fixed-size area. You can get the old behaviour back, but for some reason, that means you have to get rid of the search bar -- a feature which, btw, is, no matter what, better than you think (unless you're used to spotlight on a Mac).
I don't like the look of the new Windows Explorer -- vaguely like IE7. Both look cluttered and disorganized to me -- gone are the neat lines in favour of these bubbles and curved lines and vanished menus (until you hit ALT). That said, the new Windows Explorer and IE7 are more functional than their predecessors (the new Explorer has things like metadata tagging built into the UI).
The sidebar is more useful than you might think, so long as you have screen real-estate to spare. Flip 3d isn't totally useless, and I gather that's part of the useless eye-candy that I often hear complaints of. I still use alt+tab more.
Moreso than big features like the search bar, it's a lot of little things that make me prefer Vista. The way, for instance, all windows can span dual-monitors without a problem and not just snapping to one monitor unless the application is dual-aware. The little taskbar previews can help with selecting windows. An overall quicker "feel" on a modern enough computer (I have lots of RAM so the memory prefetching works out well for me). The way that when Vista does have a problem, it also presents you with information specific to your problem from the manufacturer -- even if it's logitech saying "we're never making Vista drivers for your webcam, sorry" -- and then weeks later if it finds a solution, it will tell you -- in this specific case, apparently logitech changed their mind, and Vista said, over a month after I'd given up on my webcam "hey! I can make it work now, you know, if you want". The way that HD I/O intensive processes like virus scans no longer slow everything else down to a crawl, even on single HD systems, because of I/O prioritization. Per-application volume settings (I have wanted this for SO long). The way the UI as a whole never really freezes under Aero (except when waiting for UAC permissions -- which I disabled, even though I know better, because it's a huge pain in the ass), and the responsiveness advantage of offloading some of the UI to the graphics card (which is otherwise just idling) instead of the CPU. The way the date-time thing in the bottom right corner of the screen (by default) let's you navigate quickly and easily through months and years and decades through a fairly intuitive interface without opening any actual dialogues. The non-crippled search feature. The way that moving multiple files and finding one could not be copied let's you skip that one and continue with the rest, or a bunch of other options (although that also means when copying large amounts of files that even with "yes to all" you might have to navigate 5 or 6 boxes identifying slightly different file transfer conflicts -- file with same name already there, destination file cannot be overwritten, source file in use, etc.). Of course, I'll be looking for applications to take advantage of the 3d interface hooks and for games to eventually use DirectX 10. But there's really nothing for now, and I don't expect there to be for quite some time yet.
I know a lot of OS's had a lot to all of these features already. My point is that these are advantages *over Windows XP*, and I don't seek to address every version of every OS from every organization running every kernel.
And why should the third parties cooperate? What doesn't MS offer to cooperate?
In this field they do, actually. But there are a lot of drivers and they contain a lot of proprietary code that MS cannot touch. Besides which, it is a somewhat unfair perspective -- it doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to say that Microsoft should start cooperating. Microsoft needs 3rd parties to cooperate with them. Cooperation is two-way, and I think you're chopping words a bit to complain about that one.
I have the original release of vista and it works great, I would recommend you get that one instead of the new version as it runs much smoother (even on slower machines) and has all the same new features (actually, a couple more, I think they took some out of the original release). they still sell it in stores under the name of "MAC OS X."
That's simply not true. Mac OSX has some features Vista doesn't, and beat Vista to market on some of them, and -- surprise! -- Vista has some Mac OSX doesn't have. To say otherwise is ignorance. Which is better? I don't really know. Nobody offered me a free Mac to try out ;), though I have played with OSX a bit. As it happens, if you want to play games, then you want some version of Windows. There are exceptions and WINE and Cedega, and a Mac user can dual-boot or parallels themselves Windows, but for the main thrust it doesn't change the point. If you want to do other things, then there are probably app-equivalents so long as you can deal with format conversion problems with those you work with.
As for bootlegging, that will be a bigger pain with Vista. Not to say it won't happen, just that with WGA and all, bootlegging XP was painful enough.
I am also quite disturbed by the way MS has been forcing updates
I can see why a person might not want this -- I'm a power user too -- but in the vast majority of cases I think the default behaviour is easily the wisest decision. Except when the *$@&!% installs an update and restarts while I'm in the bathroom without saving anything. Thank god Firefox and MS Office and OpenOffice.org all have very serviceable auto-recovery.
