I have managed to install Vista Ultimate Edition on the M400 and so far I am reasonably happy with it. This is a cautious install – there are a few things that I’m uncertain about – so I have retained my Tablet Edition (XP) in a dual boot configuration.

Early impressions:

Good

• Vista installed very easily.
• Tablet functionality is excellent – a vast improvement on the earlier software. Handwriting recognition is much better.
• Aero glass looks good. Even though the graphics score of this machine is only 3.0 it looks great.
• I installed Ultimate Edition so I have access to Media Centre. Looks good – as above. I don’t think that my aging TV card will work under Vista. Might need to find a new one.
• It seems to be more stable than XP. I hope that I am not tempting fate here!
• Ready Boost – it’s happening, and I think I’m faster!

Bad

• I have set Firefox to be my default browser but Vista doesn’t listen – I am not impressed with the fact that I can’t get IE7‘s new tabs to open in the background.
• I haven’t got Remote Desktop or Logmein working to my server yet. I haven’t tried hard though.
• Constant dialogue boxes and “are you sure?” questions could drive me demented very quickly.

EDIT: I am not impressed with having to go to the Microsoft Site and download the Mobilie Device Centre to get my iPaq Pocket PC to synchronise with Vista. That’s something that should have been sorted for RTM.

Indifferent

• The sidebar. Not sure yet.
• I haven’t got the power options sorted yet.

The geek in me wants the latest and greatest operating system on my computer. The pragmatist knows that it’s really important to get my work done on a well functioning computer. At this point I won’t be dropping my XP partition anytime soon. Certainly I’ll get more work done on Vista because it won’t let me do my usual morning’s scoot through FeedDemon opening masses of links in the background for a later peruse . On the other hand I think it could be faster than XP and I haven’t had the annoying 20-30 second freeze that is an annoying ‘feature’ of Tablet Edition on the M00.

There are a couple of things concerning me about Vista – one being the DRM and content protection measures built into the operating system (read here). On the other hand, in my line of work I will be asked to support Vista reasonably early this year.