OK, I've had Windows Vista installed for 9 days now and my verdict is ... it's not worth upgrading. Vista is supposed to be more secure than XP but this manifests itself in really annoying ways. The screen flashes black and a box pops up that must be dealt with. That'd be great if it were only for important things but it happens all the time!
I've had it happen when I want to change the smallest system setting. I've had it happen while downloading files. C'mon, get out of my way.
I'm having trouble doing backups with Quicken. Intuit probably had to do something so that they could force writes of data every time you changed something so that it wouldn't be lost. But wow, this was coming for a while.
I wanted to look at Vista before thinking about Mac OS. It's tough, though, because you can get a 17" HP or Dell laptop for $1000 less than a 17" MacBook Pro. Granted that it might take another $250-$300 to bring the laptops up to apples-to-Apples (heh) specs but that's still a lot of money to spend on an OS. Guess I could be one of the elite then, though.
Makes me wish for FreeBSD or Linux. But I don't really want to deal with an ugly, clunky windowing system as well having to reboot to run the few Windows programs I need.