OK after a week of testing of the final release version of Ultimate, a few (personal) observations.
I was surprised to find myself liking Vista quite a lot. The interface is a little slicker, it feels a lot more like a Mac in some ways. Very pretty, and reasonably intuitive.
The additional security features are nice, especially the confirmation prompts: Everytime you do, or a process does, something that needs admin rights, a confirmation box comes up EVEN WHEN LOGGED IN AS ADMINISTRATOR. That makes it a lot harder for things to slip by. All in all, I liked it. *gasp*
NWN and NWN2 both install and run fine, as did Firefox, Thuderbird. I didn't come across any compatability problems.
Having said that, I've now removed it, and gone back to XP. Right now, the device drivers just don't exist to run Vista and expect to be able to play games. Both my soundcard (Audigy 2 ZX) and graphics card (Nvidia 6800) were forced to run on Beta drivers; with either no, or very little, hardware acceleration enabled.
If people like Creative and Nvidia haven't managed to get drivers yet, I expect a lot of people are going to have a lot of problems when it's released to the public next month.
On a vaguely positive note however, MS have at least modified the EULA into something slightly less draconian, and it will now be OK to transfer the license to a new system as many times as you wish...
