Has upgrading to Windows Vista really increased your productivity?

We have only deployed a couple of PCs running Vista on our network. It is a steep learning curve to determine all of the proper security and desktop settings. We have purposely stayed away.

I've been using Vista for a few months now and am very pleased with it. There is a monumental amount of Vista hatred out there, but I've found very little in the way of objective and meaningful arguments against it. In my experience, it's a good all-around improvement over XP in terms of stability, performance and ease of use. It's different, yes, and that seems to be what most people complain about. That, or they're running it on old sub-standard hardware and find it slow. It runs very smoothly on my 1 year old Dell Inspiron E1405. My favorite improvements are the integrated search almost everywhere (which is very speedy) and the almost instant wake-from-sleep. My one complaint is the backup feature - it's so dumbed down that its useless. I've had good luck with Microsoft's free SyncToy application for backing up to an external USB drive.

unless you buying a new PC, i wouldn't recommend upgrading just yet, there are very few benefits and still enough compatibility issues to overcome.

In my experience, you'll problably not notice any productivity performance when working with vista instead of xp. For just working it is quite similar. Most of the programs are the same or very similar. In usage you'll probably see some improvements. It has a better standby functionality and speed(for laptops) but a slower boot-up time. I agree with James Belle: It is not necessary to upgrade to vista, unless you are buying new computers.

Switching to mac helped my productivity. Going back to any windows machine would probably cut that in half.

I have been using Vista for over a year now and I think its a good OS. Yes it hungry on resources and I guess that will get fixed as we go forward. From a roolout perspective the modular design of Vista allows System Admins in companies to create their specific GOLD Images of Vista. This means that you can deploy what you deem is citical to your enterprise and leave out the rest of the stuff. Plus the interface is good although it takes some time to gt used to.. Overall a good stepping stone but I am eagerly looking to the next realese of Windows on how MSFT has taken some ideas in Vista to the next level.