The weekend before Vista's official launch, I decided to take the plunge and install Vista. My old XP installation was giving me some issues (for example, a process would randomly shoot to 100% CPU utilization until I killed it for no reason) and it was time to reload anyway, so why not move to the latest and greatest?

I just got the Vista disk for my MSDN subscription, so I decided to install Vista Ultimate on my Dell Latitude D820, and I have to say I was honestly suprised how smooth everything has went and how it's going so far. Granted, I don't do any development on my main machine - it's all done in virtual machines, so all I really needed to be up and running was Outlook, FeedDemon and Virtual PC, all of which work perfectly.

There were a few programs that I had issues with - Quicken wouldn't install updates at first, but after shutting it down, Vista recognized there was a problem and asked me if I wanted to run it at a higher level of access by default, and once I did that, it works fine.

The only other major headache I had was bluetooth. The bluetooth on the D820 works out of the box, but not for everything. I ran into the same problem on XP, so I knew where to go for what I needed - the Toshiba bluetooth stack works very nicely with the Dell 350 bluetooth chip. There's a beta available for Vista, but it caused my machine to blue screen twice in a couple of days, so I uninstalled it for?now, and reverted back to using the built-in drivers.

Overall, I've been happy so far - Aero is very pretty, and everything seems snappier.

I almost forgot one cool finishing touches. Before I upgraded, I backed up my "My Documents" folder, and when I went to copy it back, it told me it was going to move all of the content from My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, etc, to a higher level folder for that since Vista now puts pictures, videos, music and documents at the same level. It's always the little things!

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