For a shortish period of time, Microsoft was offering, via PowerTogether.com, free copies of Vista (Business Edition) and Office 2007 to folks who would sit through a few video presentations on various topics. I was smart enough to sign up for the Vista giveaway but for some reason didn’t sign up for the Office 2007 one until too late (doh!). Anyway, my copy of Vista arrived on Friday and yup, it is all as advertised. I am now running Vista on my primary machine and it didn’t cost a cent (well, maybe of a couple hours of watching videos about various developer-oriented topics). It seems to be purring along without any major issues – I have one piece of hardware, a Soundblaster Audigy 2 NX soundcard, that isn’t yet Vista compatible, but, everything else works fine (and I can use the sound on the motherboard, so, I’m not missing TOO much). I haven’t tried absolutely everything, but, it seems to work just fine. It looks nice, installed quickly (about 30 minutes), seems to be easy to use, and has a few niceties over WinXP. Is it worth paying $150+ to upgrade to? Umm, probably not unless there is some piece of software that won’t run on your XP setup, but, for free (or at a reasonable price) it is a nice upgrade. Will I purchase it to put on my laptop? I haven’t decided yet (it probably won’t run “Aero” that makes Vista look so flashy). The sad thing is that I bought my laptop about 3 weeks too soon or I could have gotten the Vista upgrade for something like $10, but, at the time I really needed a new laptop and putting off the purchase for 3 weeks didn’t seem like a good option.