I spent a few days this week trying to actually work on a Vista box. (As opposed to what could have been, at the time, fairly described as the knee-jerk, ripthatpieceofcrudoutandinstallsomethingelsebeforeIpuke reactions I’ve had after brief exposures to Vista in the past.) I really did try to give it a fair shake this time.
What a pile of junk!
It crippled a nice, fast, 64-bit computer. More resource sucking eye-candy isn’t going to fix the problem, but that seems to be where MSFT is headed.
I’ve found a way to use the Vista 64 kernel as a workstation and remove the bloatware and crippleware and DRM. No media center, no sidebar, no aero, etc. And it leaves it open the possibility to install any shiny bloaty features from vista SP1 that you want.
Convert your Windows Server 2008 to a Workstation
http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/
http://www.win2008workstation.com/forum/
There are compatibility lists in the forum, pretty much 97% or so of the software that runs on Vista64 runs on win2k8 server64, the only new software I’ve had to buy is server versions of anti-virus suites. Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 works like a charm, for the extra $50 a year.