Windows Vista is a great operating system. In fact, it's the best full-featured client operating system I've seen (after working with different versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X for my day to day tasks). I believe Leopard is a better general purpose (read: for dumb people, aka users) OS but if you need to do something serious, nothing comes close to Vista. What I don't get is how people compare it to XP. In my opinion Vista is a MUCH better operating system than XP. I can't stand working with XP at all. It seems even slower if you have more than 2GB of RAM. Vista is a nice OS, though it has its own problems and I should admit it's far less than expectations.
I didn't want to continue OS wars here in this post. I want to talk about the nice system recovery features in Windows Vista which is really great if you run into disasters. My desktop PC is powered by a Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 2x500GB hard disks configured as a 2x400GB RAID 0 and 2x100GB RAID 1 volumes. It runs Windows Vista x64 on the RAID 0 volume.
To improve performance, I had activated the advanced write back caching on the system drive.
In the past few weeks, we've experienced lots of power outages (one more reason get out of Iran as soon as possible). Once, I turned my PC on after a power failure and an unfriendly black screen told me that your registry file is corrupted. The system couldn't boot anymore.
A nice less advertised feature of Windows Vista came to help, I inserted the DVD and booted into it. Got into recovery options and it automatically started startup repair. Apparently, it issued a chkdsk command, checked the filesystem and replayed the journal. It rebooted, the same error popped up again. I booted into the DVD once more and it gave me the option to use system restore to recover the system. I restored to the latest restore point available and after a few minutes, the system booted happily. It saved lots of hassles.
Windows Vista is really improved in the area of system recovery. In fact the shadow copy feature has saved my data several times. Once it was 10GB of data on an external HDD which I had just shift-deleted! It's really a great and useful feature. Unlike the well advertised Time Machine on Leopard which is nothing more than a very simple backup application with a fancy, useless user interface, that is kinda just a demo of CoreAnimation framework, previous versions is a real new feature that really works. I'm not the kind of person that has enough hard disks to do all my backups. Previous versions give me exactly what I want at no extra cost and it's one of the features I can't live happily without. As a friendly advice, turn it on all drives. It'll help you when you least expect it!