“It doesn’t get in the way once your machine is set up and it’s reassuring that you’re running as a restricted user so if some rogue software does take over your machine, it can’t do any damage.”

I wonder if that reassurance is justified.

As for the other security improvements, only time will tell. We might be starting over; XP is already pretty secure after years of patching by Microsoft.

If I hadn’t lost my XP CD, I’d happily say “Welcome to the World Vista! Now go back to your mom, I’ll see you when you grow up.”

I mean from win95 to 98 there wasnt much difference, and win98 to winME there wasnt much more except more eye candy (and more instability) but from winME to win95 there was a large difference
same goes for winNT->win2k->xp (once again, more shinies and a decent chunk friendlier) -> vista

all of which werent exactly revolutionary changes (except maybe NT->2k) but you go back more then 1 version and you notice the effects of progress

Also I love the performance boosts on vista (my desktop is still XP till Im happy enough things are vista compatibly) but what used to take 5min to load on my laptop (due to having to check a large amount of files on a slow drive) and 1 min on my desktop, now under vista takes 1min on my laptop aswell, the vista installer is finally done right, and windows has finally caught up to every other operating system in getting windows file sharing to work (and the numerous nifty features everywhere such as the ones you have mentioned)
so when the time comes I will be upgrading, atm im just waiting for the world to catch up

Northern Hell, I knew (by the sound of it), unknown (6).