Performance:
The first thing any OS aficionado does when he installs an OS is check how it performs on his hardware. Vista performs well, but it sure takes its liberty with the hardware. Fresh install size was 11GB. I wouldn’t begrudge it 11 GB if it had a LARGE quantity of preinstalled programs.But it doesn’t.
RAM usage is another black hole. On a fresh boot, Vista is using 50% of my RAM (883MB), not counting cached files. After a couple hours of sub normal use (just web browsing and playing a few games with WMP running), Vista was using over 60% of my ram, or about 580MB, and rising all the time. My current usage in Kubuntu is 480MB. But this is after 2 days of being on, being suspended, and running Gimp, OO.org, looking at pictures, web browsing, evolution email, beryl, and most of all running KDE. I have never seen Kubuntu use over 500MB of RAM (400 being the norm), and have even run Kubuntu quite successfully on 256MB. Vista was also using half of its allocated page file( think swap). While this does speed up the OS, it increases disk usage which is NOT a good thing on laptops. Speaking of disk usage, the hard drive light was almost continually blinking on and off. It could have been that I was playing music, but on Linux using Amarok, the hard drive light blinks consistently once every 15 seconds to fill up the cache buffer. I do not have indexing enabled. Also, I was experiencing slight skips in my music(its not my music, it all sounds fine in Linux) especially when I was doing things requiring disk usage (starting a program).
Finally, we come to CPU usage. Vista actually doesn’t do a bad job here. the nominal CPU use is was about 10%. Whenever I to move a window, the usage goes up to 25% per core, which is comparable to Linux with Beryl. I did however, want to know at what speed my processor was runnning. But I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Configurability:
I looked in the Windows Mobility Center for where to configure the CPU frequency. I created my own power profile thinking I could configure it in there. Pretty much the only thing I could configure in this dialog was what to do with the computer after it had been inactive for a certain amount of time. Yes, this is the acclaimed Windows Mobility Center. Guidance-power-manager has more functionality than it,Kpowersave passes it in leaps and bounds. This lack of configuration is pandemic throughout Vista. As I ranted about before, you can’t chose the color of your title bars and you can’t configure keyboard shortcuts. You also can’t change the height of the title bars which I always do in Linux to save vertical desktpo space. If that wasn’t bad enough, you can’t configure the size, or number of panels (not sure about position). It seems as though Microsoft has a Henry Ford-like motto “You can have it any way you like, as long as it is the THE way We like it.” Linux OTOH has always been the “Burger King of OS’s” with its implied motto, “Have it your way, its just more productive.”
Preinstalled Apps:
Internet Explorer is as bad as I have heard. It can’t even render the MythWeb page on our MythTV backend! Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari can render the page correctly, so I don’t know whats up with that. The “stop” button is also in a very unintuitive location, and IE tried top copy safari with its pregress-bar-in location-field. The little “add a tab” button on the tab bar is very useful however. IE is pretty bad at file browsing as well. My pet peeve with it is its lack of a “up” button. A File browser without a “up” button is all but useless. The back button does make it kind of obsolete, but what if you start off in a directory and want to go to the one above it? No “back” will save you now. You have to go to the left panel and choose your directory. Or you could use my favorite feature of Window’s Explorer: the location bar has drop down menus for the parent’s subdirectories. IE/WE still needs an Up-arrow though.
Windows Media Player isn’t so bad. It looks nice and works OK. I do not like the way you create playlists with a separate playlist editor pane. Amarok’s approach is, IMHO, much better, with one pane for playing and creating playlists, and one pane for selecting songs from. The panel applet for when WMP is minimized is very nice as well although I wish it stayed on the panel even when WMP is maximized.
All the games are real nice. The new versions of all the popular games confirm Window’s place in the business world. “Use Linux for servers, Mac for graphics, and Windows for Solitaire” 
I especially like Inkball, a interesting variation to the popular game jazzball (Kbounce).
The Sound Mixer is very nice as well. The ability to set the volume of every app capable of playing sounds is very very nice (and something I want to see come out of Phonon). However, I think that there should be a master, and that none of the individual channels should be able to change the volume of the master. The way it is now, every channel is its own master, not a slave whose 100% is in relation to the master volume. The latter, IMHO would be a bit more useful.
Windows Sidebar is really cool too. The Notes applet (called a Gadget) looks to be very useful, and the CPU and RAM usage meters are nice. I downloaded a wordpress shortcut widget from the windows community repository; very simple. KDE’s SuperKaramba (in KDE4, Solid) has had this functionality for years, and its addition to Vista is great feature.
