I hope mine is not an exception to the rule, because this is pretty cool: I've been running the release version of Windows Vista on one of my laptop computers since yesterday (one that I use all the time and which does a whole boatload of work), and quite literally everything seems to run considerably smoother and faster than it ever did on XP. Now, I don't have Aero Glass/WDM on (graphics card doesn't support it), but Office, web browsers and all apps are notably better. Especially Outlook. Wow.

The only issue I have found so far is that the Explorer shell seems to hang every now and then. I probably just have a rogue random utility that's not playing well. I'll have to look into that. At least when I kill the Explorer process, it's sending trouble data off to Microsoft for analysis. That's a good thing. It recovers gracefully, though when the process restarts. While I have not seen this kind of issue since the Windows 95/98 days, the fact that the process comes back gracefully and everything still works is a plus.

I ran all the betas, and I for one am glad they delayed and fixed up some stuff. So far it looks pretty darn good. Some of the dialogs (like the new Start Menu style and file system dialogs) are a little goofy for a power user, but I intend to stick with them and see if I can make them work well. I am, after all, getting older and more set in my ways, so I find I need to allow more time for me to adjust than I used to, heh.