@Geoffrey W

I run Vista x64 Ultimate SP2 on a decent sort of HP lappy with 3GB of memory. For every small nice feature I have noticed (like renaming files defaulting to renaming stem names) there are some extremely annoying stuff that just gets in the way of working.

Probably partly due to Hp/Intel video drivers, but the laptop is very unhappy about waking from sleep in two locations (work/home) with different external displays. Generally takes several attempts to get video sorted and minutes go by getting the machine awake, just to do a quick check on mail (Outlook 2007). Oh, and UAC is now turned off, even though I persevered with it for ages as I really think running as root is a bad idea. COM+ subsystem is broken (I am a developer and needed this). Oh and and the only Ultimate extras I tried are broken - video wallpaper is borked with multiple monitors & waking from sleep, while backup does strange things.

Ok, it might be my subjective experience, but we have an identical machine running XP (I upgraded mine to develop & test software on a 64-bit platform) and the acid test whether is Vista is overall better than cheaper alternatives like XP or Ubuntu?. Honestly, I have to say no.

I feel for the guy trying to make a decision as to buy now or later. For me, Win7 will be helping me make the decision to buy another laptop later rather than pre-October, (though at least one guy here is now running OSX which does seem nicer), but if you need new machines now, you might as well just tote up the cost benefits; it will cost more later to upgrade vs the benfits of having a new XP/Vista machine now