With right around a month of service, I've made the conscious decision to revert my laptop back to Windows Vista Enterprise. If you remember about a month ago, I discussed that in order to demo Hyper-V for this fall's upcoming series of conferences, I made the decision to "upgrade" from Vista to Server 2008. Reports everywhere discussed how Server 2008 eliminated much of the "pain" of Vista while providing a substantially faster user experience. WIth the codebase being similar between the two OSs, drivers magically worked with no problems between the two.

I can handily report now that my experience hasn't been all lolipops and ice cream. Here's a run-down on what I've discovered with my x64 HP Pavilion dv6500t CTO:

• With no end to button twisting, the sound driver consistently experienced stuttering and hesitation during operation.
• Video drivers worked relatively well, although I found a substantially noticeable reduction in graphics performance with Aero enabled (one not found with Vista).
• HP's hardware-specific drivers also didn't do so well, as I experienced problems getting the quick start buttons to function properly. The mouse showed no problems, but...heck...its just a mouse.
• The installation of the Hyper-V Role immediately disables all Sleep and Hibernate functionality, which makes it very difficult to use the laptop while moving. In a conference situation where I'm moving from room to room, this inability is effectively unusable.
• Its a small deal, but big for me. My USB GPS dongle for Streets and Trips would not work no matter how many hacks I attempted.

But the real kicker here is that I found no discernable increase in speed in the jump. Moving from Vista x64 with 4G of RAM to Server 2008 x64 with the same RAM count presented effectively no improvement in performance of any type. In fact, I actually saw a decrease in performance with logons as the Hyper-V role itself tends to slow down that process.

One could argue that a dual-boot scenario might work best for me. However, I dug my own grave with that solution, cheaping out on the machine's 150G hard drive that immediately fills up with offline files mirroring from my primary workstation.

All in all, for those Vista haters that would rather have a $3000 operating system on their laptop instead of one that works, I've given it a try and found most of the fud out in the blogosphere to be just that...FUD.

For laptops of sufficient processor speed with an x64 operating system and 4G of RAM, in my opinion Vista remains the way to go.