Where'd my post go? Oh well.

After an hour playing with this OS I found myself putting things the way I like for XP.

The 3d window task switcher is candy that is less functional. I do like the alt+tab previews though.

The sidebar is almost fairly useless behind windows, I suppose as resources are easy to spare they'll be fun.

Migrating my home machine (which I don't care too much about) I came across issues with shortcuts to VPN's all missing, and a few devices not working.

I am failing to see how this OS will help me get my job done any better than XP besides the nice imaging components of the backup subsystem. Time will tell though. UAC, even in it's current format, will simply annoy the crap out of every user from power on down to newb and will be the first thing turned off on most machines.

Is my 9800 pro going to be able to cope with Aero?

other than looking nice is there any practical advantage to having the aero stuff?

I'm surprised anybody is surprised by this (though I guess I always underestimate the pervasiveness of the "everything Microsoft does is big and bloated and inefficient and stupid" meme). When the UI isn't doing anything, it isn't doing anything. So it's not going to use significantly more more power. Only when it is doing something intensively 3D -- like shuffling the active windows, or doing fancy composition using NET 3.0 / WPF / WinFX (or whatever it's being called this week) -- would you expect it to make the GPU work up a sweat. And those operations tend to be extremely brief: unlike a game, you're not transforming and texturing polys and updating the display ~60 times a second.

This is KIND of off topic, but does anyone else find the sidebar SUPER annoying? I mean, I run a 20" widescreen LCD, but thats cuz I LOVE screen real estate, not because I want to give it up to a clock.

been running the beta of Vista for a few weeks now I like it better than XP.
Everything just feels alot quicker. I still use XP most of the time on my dualboot system. Games and application compatibility being the reason. I also wish they would fix the shutdown and restart speed in build 5728, it takes too long. I'm sure RC2 which is suppose to be released soon, will solve those issues aswell as bugs.

I find the whole interface sort of annoying. It's just too....well, for lack of a better term, busy. There is just too much stuff going on. Semitransparent windows over bright backgrounds with a huge sidebar and the taskbar with all that glistening stuff all over it. It's like they took the original OS X (somewhere around 10.1) and turned it up to 11. Even Apple has dialed back on all the lickable interface stuff.

I realize that most of this can be simplified rather easily, but it just seems like overkill to begin with. Quite honestly, while the XP interface is rather dull, it's miles ahead of this. I've been using Vista on my home media machine and I just can't seem to get used to it.

Hope this OS is going to be more exciting then XP..

well i may as well post here since nobody is using the comments on the front page ;)

Thanks for doing the testing i asked for Geoff, exactly what i was after... with a surprising and far better outcome than i imagined :)

I know getting windows XP based numbers would show the systems idle power draw in a more comparable light, but for a hugely quick and dirty comparison, all anyone neds to do is take a quick look at some TR videocard articles to see that the idle numbers being reported here are pretty damn low, so im not sure there will be much if any change by using XP instead of vista's classic interface, not more than a couple watts id say.

Thanks again Geoff :)

I would've liked to see an idle Windows XP setup as a baseline for comparison.

While it's not the purpose of the investigation, which is a good one I might add, knowing the power consumption of an XP install would still be nice for comparative purposes. Maybe Geoff can do this for a few of the graphics cards - one ATI one NV - with the system otherwise identical to save some work of driver switching between 5 cards.

Please digg if you find this interesting.

http://digg.com/hardware/Windows_Vista_only_marginally_impacts_GPU_...

nice, dude... this is the kind of stuff i like to see - just a geek geeking around, and answering a question as methodically as he can. :) i think you've now given us the mark that says Vista's eye candy is basically free - in terms of power consumption.

Awesome perspective. Thanks for sharing :-D