So I installed Windows Vista Release Candidate 1. I must say that it's definately tons more stable as compared to Beta 2, but mostly because drivers are being built a little better. (Which is the fault of nVidia and Creative, no Microsoft.)

Aero seems to run full power just fine, as usual. This time, installing the videocard drivers didn't render the entire OS a blank screen... almost as if it was piping video through TV-out, but I tried using that and it was blank, too. Very stumped over that, but RC1 seems to cure that.

The volume control weirdness seems to be a bit more conventional than in Beta 2. It still has a per-application slider system, but, this time, you can control the master speakers. Unless that was something added with the new Audigy drivers, which actually work!! I'm impressed.

I really have no idea what everyone's whining about. Vista is running XP-solid for me, and I'm very, very happy with it. It still has that User Account Control dealy. That thing that'll pop up when programs try to automatically do things. People complain about that, but they must be too dumb to notice that you can shut it off. It'll be handy when tracking down spyware junk and trojans and such. Leave it off by default, then, if you think you're having spyware problems, turn on UAC and it'll pop up for every program trying to do things. I personally find it very handy.

Anyway... yeah. It works for me. I'm going to try to stay using Vista for a while now. See how it stands up to my daily desktop usage. (It's not installed on my laptop, yet... laptop has some mission critical things I can't chance problems with.)