Microsoft's Windows Vista has been around for over a year now, receiving a lot of bad press; along with a few promising reviews. Having used Vista x64 Ultimate Edition since January 2007 myself, I've found it to be a great operating system.
I've not experienced any major problems - and the minor ones that I have come across, are run-of-the-mill issues that many encounter when getting to grips with a new O/S. My only gripe is the poor network performance when compared with XP and Microsoft's Server operating systems. As all my data is kept on servers, my Vista PC uses the nic all of the time, transferring files of varying sizes to and from the client.
Those of you who have used Vista in a similar situation will be familiar with the long transfer times encountered when copying files to and from a network resource. Thankfully, Microsoft have just released their first Service Pack for Vista - which promises to iron out many of the problems users have experienced in the last year or so.
Prior to installing SP1 tonight, I decided to 'benchmark' the network transfer times. I copied the full 743,936KB (~743MB) Service Pack 1 (x64) from a shared network drive on my Fileserver, to a partition on Red19. Both the server and client run 250GB Samsung Spinpoints (7200rpm, PATA) and utilise a Gigabit network interface card, with 2 D-Link Gigabit switches between the 2.
Pre-SP1, it took 59.9 seconds to transfer the file from server to client, with an average transfer speed of 11.5MB/sec (estimated).
Post-SP1 installation, it took 50.4 seconds, with an average speed of 15.5MB/sec (again, estimated). That's about 9.5s and 4MB/sec quicker after installing Service Pack 1. Although not a huge improvement - it is definitely noticeable and should contribute towards a faster Vista user experience.
One final thing - Vista's estimation of how long the transfer will take is now spot on. No more delays while it guesses and second-guesses the eta! Let me know how you're finding Vista's first Service Pack and if you've come across any other improvements that have helped.