So... like... greetings from XP again
I really liked the AeroGlass interface and didn't begrudge it sucking up >10% of my 1.6GHz CPU, although I could live without the new Start menu. A surprising number of XP utilities and drivers worked OK as long as you set "Compatibility with XPSP2" properties on the installer and sometimes the installed app.
Having fast, reliable hibernation was nice, but one of the ways it hibernates fast is by not bothering to ask the device drivers "so, like, are you able to hibernate or will you be dead when I come back ?". As a result, I didn't figure out that my modem driver couldn't hibernate for a while.
Performance was OK on a 512MB system as long as I didn't load sound card drivers and didn't try to do too much at once. The killer for me, though, was the fact that I couldn't get a working VPN client to run under Vista -- I think Nortel is waiting to see if Microsoft actually ships it before doing any work on the VPN client ;(
