I installed Windows Vista RC1 on my laptop. (Don’t worrrrrry, Ubuntu Edgy Eft is still on there… urm… somewhere… )
By Jove, it works pretty good.

Nice colors, etc… A little too much nanny-state in the ‘are you sure you want to do this’ process for installing drivers and such (which I had to do to watch the downloaded tv show I wanted to watch). Something don’t work. The touchpad isn’t setup to my liking (don’t know if I need to grab a drivers for it, though I might) One device is unkown in the Device Manager (most probably the SD-Card reader, that doesn’t work on Edgy either)

I don’t get any of the fancy graphics, as far as I can tell right now, I can’t even force it to try. (Intel 855GM graphics chip, ain’t the swiftest kid on the block… but it runs Compiz fairly well, but Redmond won’t let me try the BLING on Vista… )

Networking works good, the display is bright, the inclusion of a widgety sidebar is nice (never found one I really liked so far in Ubuntu… though I’m sure one will develop sooner or later…)

So I’ll keep ‘er around on my spare partition (where did I put my grub reinstall disk so I can go back to Ubuntu in a dual boot environment) the beta agreement runs out like in March, so I’ll have time to fiddle with it more…

It does come at a fairly high cost, fully installed 11.7 GB off the harddrive (this partition is only 14, so I’m a little scrunched… )

More as I fiddle.

UPDATED: I can add that installing Vista helped me realize the flakiness I’ve been having with Ubuntu of late, is most likely hardware related since I got a couple of blue-screen/paging errors. I’m going on the hunch that my lower memory might not be fully functional (I have two chips one 256MB under the keyboard, and one 1GB chip installed in the bottom.)

So I removed the 256MB chip and will see if that stops the lock ups. Nice to shift to another OS to see if problems carry over or not. Ubuntu just froze, sometimes rebooted. Windows BSD remains the same as old school XP.