A lot of people are asking me if I am using Vista, if they should use Vista, if I think Vista will get good adoption, and so on. I have Vista on some machines, still have XP on my ancient primary laptop, and miss Vista when I'm not using it. I tell people this and they assume it's all about the shiny and the seethrough and the pretty. It's really not. For me the fast search is a big thing. And I still consider UAC a feature and have no intention of turning it off or launching everything I do from an elevated command prompt. I like the thumbnails that actually show your content - though I suppose some might dismiss that as "pretty", it's saved me from opening big files with odd names more than once, just so I can tell whether I want to delete them or not. An MSDN article lists a number of useful benefits of running on Vista that have nothing to do with being pretty. Beyond UAC and other security benefits, consider Sleep (fast as Standby, safe as Hibernate), SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, restart manager, presentation mode, ... there's so much! It's not just about the .NET Framework 3.0 -- you can have that downlevel. It really is a new version of the operating system and it does a lot of things a lot better.

So I forgive it for being pretty.

Kate