With all the talk about Windows Vista, seeing as both Vista RC1 (and now RC2) and Office 2007 are freely available to anyone with broadband fast enough to download it in a reasonable time, or a credit card to order copies on DVD, we thought we’d put Microsoft’s latest through its paces for ITWire. Here are the results!

So, after three weeks of very solid use, how does it stack up? Well... the experience hasn’t just been surprising...  it has been surprisingly good! I haven’t needed to go back to Windows XP, and XP is now but a memory. Using Windows XP on other people’s machines feels like going back to Windows 95 or 98, so I can happily say I'm an ex-XP user.

Although my system only rates a 2.8 of Microsoft’s scale (which goes up to 5.9), this score is based on the lowest score your system scored, and as with most notebook computers, this was the hard drive. Vista RC1 is running on a Tablet PC with 2Gb of memory and a 1.83Ghz Core Duo processor, and 224Mb of that 2Gb allocated to the integrated graphics card.

So, the system scored much more highly for graphics and processor performance, with scores between 3 and just under 4.6. The fancy Aero 3D graphics work almost perfectly, with only occasional visual glitches when the system throws you back to ‘Vista Basic’ whenever a web site activates Java, and for now that’s only my Internet banking sites, news web sites from News Limited and occasional random sites.