In my university department, we still strongly recommend people not get Vista and get XP instead, to the point that we'll even reformat a machine that comes with Vista to XP unless the person has a compelling reason to want Vista.

Vista and HP printers has been an absolute disaster. Now, part of that is that the lower end HP printers (and I'm not talking the absolute bottom end, but a more 'normal' desktop laser printer) have really gone downhill in quality over time, and a lot of it is probably that HP just plain dropped the ball on printer drivers.

For all that JClishe has done tests on the same machine to show that Vista does no worse, and in some cases better than XP, that's definitely not been my experience. We've had a few Dell XPS M1330 laptops come through recently, a couple of which have been reformatted to XP, and then I was just working on one that was new but still had Vista on it, and I couldn't believe the difference in the speed of the computers (and all were configured similarly). It was bad enough that I was checking the amount of memory in the system wondering if it had been ordered with too little, and checking to make sure there weren't bad sectors on the hard drive (and no, neither of those were the case).

I do think a lot of the performance drag on Vista can be attributed to the Aero user interface. Disable that back to basic, and things improve. Even with decent graphics in a system, Aero is just a dog.

But what it really comes down to is I'm not overly convinced there's any compelling advantage to "upgrade" to Vista. Prerelease it kept having features stripped from it that were originally supposed to be in it, and ultimately it just turned into XP with an (arguably) "pretty" interface on it, with an attempt to improve security (which I'm also not overly convinced has improved). I definitely don't think there's any real good reason to actually pay to upgrade an existing system to Vista. If the system comes with it, it's not going to kill you to keep it, and it's certainly not unusable, but I do feel you're losing a noticeable amount of the performance of the system (but arguably, a lot of people won't necessarily even notice that, especially if the new machine is much more modern than their old one anyways).

Personally, I've used all the windows versions, generally trying out prerelease versions of all of them also before they came out, and I'll certainly be taking a look at the prerelease versions of 7 when I can get ahold of that. With the exception of Me (which should never have been released), I've generally felt that each step was a noticeable improvement over the previous up until Vista. Vista's just the first one that's completely turned me off.