I have to agree with you. After less than a week of playing with Vista RC1, it's painfully obvious that this is not a huge step forward. There are times when I'm impressed by some of the cool new features, and others when it just feels like a skinned copy of XP.

It's tough, because I really like the look of the OS. I think they've really improved that. Aero is nice, although I can't run it on my system, because you have to have a certain amount of video memory for certain resolutions. I apparently need 256MB for 2560x1600. If I bump it down to 1280x800 I can see all the Aero visuals, though.

So I'm torn. On the one hand, I like the OS and it seems faster than XP. On the other, I'm having just a few compatability problems that wouldn't exist with XP. Hmm, I'll have to think about it (and the answer, for me at least, is not Linux ).