Vista's ok, 2008 seems better
Vista's been running ok for me using MS-supplied bits, exceptions are a couple Dell notebooks with Vista pre-installed. A support rep let slip in chat with my daughter that the M1330 factory Vista image might have been a little bit corrupted and she may want a bare-metal install from DVD. (Next day another tech nixed that and had her re-image -again- from the rescue partition.)
Meanwhile the home-built system using MS' dvd runs fine. DRM seems to slow Media Player pretty bad once you load it up with a few hundred CD's.
2008 has surprised me in the lab for quickness and stability. The GUI makes it deceptively easy for more people to manage. Not everyone wants to know the joy, power, and intuitive ease-of-use vi and vim can afford us, and even some admins think they have better things to do than write their own device drivers.
For appliances, though, I don't think we'll be jumping off RHEL, centOS or Suse anytime soon. Nothing like an arcane OS where the only standard look-and-feel is the command line, to keep people from touching your stuff.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
