Well I upgraded.  Micro Center has a deal for Vista Home Premium OEM at $79 so I picked it up last week.  Got it installed Friday night and so far I’m happy with it.  I picked it up mostly for gaming and prep for Crysis.  I did pick up Halo 2 but not really played it much but it looks great as well.  I also want to pick up Shadowrun since it’s the first full cross platform game out there (Xbox 360 vs. PC gamers) but haven’t as of yet but it’s fairly cheap.

I wanted to try out my tried and true games first to really get a feel for how it would perform on the gaming platform.  Honestly I’ve not seen any issues with BF2142 (other than the “this game has only been tested on Windows XP” message on install) and the typical issues I had on XP with PunkBuster.  BF2 also has the same message.

The only issue I’ve had so far is hibernate or sleep.  I found the system locked up (or at least non-responsive by the monitor) the first time I attempted to “revive” it in this state.

I’ve also played around with the built in games on Premium and they’re not bad.  I even tried out Purble Place and found it friendly to kids and adults with the levels.  I’m a gamer, have to try every game I find! hehe

As far as interface I haven’t been too upset but I do miss the up arrow but found that “alt-up arrow” does the same thing so being a keyboard person that’s not been a hard adaption.  I was able to set most of the rest of the system to how I liked it in XP (no frills settings that I’ve liked since 95 but with the Aero design and settings that I find appealing as I did with XP from 98/2000 and using the XP “themes”).

The installation was a breeze, no issues with dropping the DVD in and installation, even to my Intel RAID.  I believe it took about 20 minutes total (on an Intel 6600 core 2 duo).  I also found that my 26GB system drive wasn’t enough after installation of the OS and my standard tools as well as Adobe CS3 but no fear, I was able to drop my gaming drive from 125GB to 113GB and increase my system drive to 38GB with no issues in the drive management piece.  I have typically ran with a 15-20GB system drive on XP so it was a bit amazing that my 26GB partition wasn’t enough and I was down to like 2GB.  I did turn off system restore afterwards and moved my temp file to another, larger, drive.  The problem I did find is that it didn’t allow me to delete the pagesys file after redirection of the file but I’ve moved on from that for now.

So that’s it for my Vista experience… So far, so good.  Other than figuring out a new OS and changing what I can back to how I like them (from previous OSes) I’m good to go.