To be honest...
... This story has been a source of amusement for a while, go get 'em little guys...
Until this weekend when the MS dev pack copy of Vista Ultimate from work accidentally came home with me, and just for the hell of it I thought I'd try it out.
I installed it on my media centre Acer Aspire Idea 510, which is basically a laptop in a Hi-Fi sized box, nothing super special at all except it has 2 DVB tuners and is nice and quiet... T5500 cpu, 1 gig of ram and Nvidia 7600 Go video.
I didn't for one minute thing it would do the full Aero Glass business, and if it did it was going to be as clunky as hell and quickly get turned off.
But no, it did it, and it did it well, and that was at 1280x1024 on a real monitor, not just on the TV! I was quite amazed!
So I have to wonder, what clunky pieces of doo doo did these people buy that had a Vista capable sticker on them? If they paid more that $400 I think they were stitched up!
I'm even more amazed that my Vista hasn't yet crashed... I had some fun finding the drivers for the DVB cards, but apart from one instance when it just paused everything for 30 seconds when I was browsing a network share, it's been good as gold.
Can I see a point in Vista? Err, no, it's very pretty, but apart from that I can't actually see any point to it. It will probably stay on the Media Centre machine, but that's only because having been through the Acer recover procedure once already, it's such a horrible mess I'm not going to do that again, oh and hopefully the ability to remotely add recording to the schedule will work from the UK in the Vista Media Center version, and not be a USA only "coming soon to rest of world" feature like the one in MCE2005