bill - 12:54 am on Apr 12, 2008 (gmt 0)

No, there are some usability improvements in Vista that trump XP. The Start menu is one of them. I'm so used to simply typing a few letters of the program I'm looking for on Vista that XP's Start menu is an antiquated hassle now. I'm also a fan of the new Windows Explorer in Vista. The Windows key + F brings up search in both XP and Vista, but I hardly use it in XP. In Vista system search is finally useful. All of these things save me time over XP.

Aero is nice, but that's not a major selling point in my book. Vista is a nice incremental upgrade from XP. I think MS did a decent job improving the user interface on this one. Sure, it takes a bit to get used to after years of XP, but I'm not averse to that.

In my experience Vista has been infinitely more stable than XP. I only reboot my Vista workstation when a software update requires it. I can let it run for months without noticing a slowdown, and it's never crashed on me. XP on the other hand gets gummed up and doesn't run smoothly after a while.

Looking forward, this new version of Windows probably won't toss out the UI improvements of Vista. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't a huge fan when I first started using Vista either. The fact that several of the UI changes actually save me time on a day to day basis have turned me though.