"You can click with the mouse on the pictures of applications when you do Alt+Tab"

em. I always hated mouse. I prefer multi-desktop environment to moving my hand from keyboard-to-mouse and back again

Snipping? Install OneNote, press Windows+S.

What hardware are you running on? I'm running vista on a MacBook Pro and I don't find vista slow, but the networking was very slow - there are a number of threads on this and the resolutions were, turning off remote differential compression, turning off thumb nails, disabling autotuning - however none of that worked for me, but, the new bootcamp 1.3 that came out yesterday with new drivers did, copying across a wlan now works really well, I copied a 1GB img file across the wlan in a couple of minutes.

My advice is, don't pave your machine, stick with it and see if you can get any updated drivers.

You're absolutely right -- I was initially very excited about Vista, but after helping a family member setup a new Vista laptop I became progressively unimpressed. I don't see myself ever upgrading.

Honestly, after using some version of Windows for nearly 18 years I've kind of got Windows fatigue. I've been running Ubuntu on an old laptop and I'm loving it. Don't miss XP or Vista at all. In fact, if VS.NET would run under Wine, I'd leave for good and never look back.

If you want the alt-tab-click in XP, I suggest TaskSwitchXP - http://www.ntwind.com/software/taskswitchxp.html.

For snipping, try Windows Clippings (http://www.windowclippings.com/) or Snag-It (http://www.techsmith.com/).

I do admit, the snipping tool is a great addition to Vista. I thought it was me that copy files over the network was slow. I upgrade to gigabit ethernet and it still took unusually long to copy stuff to my NAS.

What type system are you running?

I recently got a Core 2 Duo with 2 Gig Toshiba laptop - it is running quite smooth for me.

The network transfers are slower though. Although I've noticed it is sporatic - slow one time, quite fast another time (over same network).

I was actually surprised that I'm enjoying Vista after hearing so much bad things - I'm running VS 2005 and Sql Express on Premium Home Edition.

I suspect a service pack will address the items such as network transfer.

I like the gadgets - that has been killer for me. I download the Yahoo ones and there are a few that are quite slick - ie. the weather desktop gadget.

I also liked the Snippet tool :)

Lastly, I like the network security , if you tell it 'home' or 'public' then it automatically adusts your settings, like file sharing - I call it network profiles. That is big since I'm always connecting to different places with the laptop, home, work, Panera :)

Vista's biggest productivity booster for me as been a tool 3rd party tool that integrates with Vista's built-in search functionality - Start++.

Phil introduced me to Start++ and I've been hooked ever since. I even dropped SlickRun because I can accomplish the same stuff, plus get the nice search functionality all bundled up together.

This network one is odd, I've never personally suffered from it so I'm happy with Vista but MS need to figure out what exactly the problem is.

I'm now wondering about nuking the old XP partition on my laptop (or at least making it a lot smaller)

I found very similar arguments with Vista.

Work at a Government institution, we received Vista much earlier than most companies, most of us got brand new top of the line dell machines with dual cores and 2gb of memory. Even with the newest fastest machines, alot of us still had ALOT of problems.

Out of 6 people that originally installed it back in november, 1 of us still has it installed.

I last about 3 months and got completely fed up with the slowness of the whole OS and went back to XP. I can confidently say that I will not be going back to vista anytime soon.

For the file copy thing, you could try these if you havent' already:

http://mytechweblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/slow-file-copymove-in-vista-here-is_05.html

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled and reboot

hello.

i believe that the backspace key behavior depends on the context. if the right side of explorer has focus, it performs a "back" operation. on the other hand, if focus is on the tree, it'll perform an "up" operation

for screen capture, check out ScreenHunter

http://www.wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter_free.htm

You should check out Gadwin Print Screen. It's free and IMO better than the Vista snipper.

http://www.gadwin.com/printscreen/

Ayende, don't use the default Vista tools.

For fast files copy: Teracopy ( free for home users ) -> http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.asp

Explorer replacement -> millions!!! All better than explorer: FreeCommander, Total Commander, a43, explorerXP, ultraExplorer, tabbyFile...

I don't use ANY of Vista default tools. And I must say that UAC is GREAT, is the unique real advantage of Vista.

Backspace in Explorer caught me out too. Thankfully there is Alt+Up which has the "correct " behaviour.

I think the trick with Vista is to drop it on big new hardware, I've seen poor performance when upgrading an old XP box to Vista.

I feel better when I read Vista is slow. Cause that what I actually experience with it. I did try a few trick that I found on the internet but no luck. In the end I just gave up and back to WinXP also looking for an alternative "Ubuntu 7.04 or later version"

Vista suck!

I have yet to see good things about Vista (other than how great it looks). If I really want a cool looking OS I'll fire up my Mac and stare at it for awhile. For an operating system that doesn't combat me, I'm happy with XP. Besides, from a development standpoint, Vista offers me nothing.

I haven't seen Vista's snipping feature, but Snagit rocks and is the best for screencaps. Lots of options and you can get it with Camtasia, which is awesome for doing screencasts. My money would be to use those tools (if that's what "snipping" is).

I think having search builtin to the OS is my favorite feature. Combine that with the ability to tag files with keywords and saved search folders, you can really slice different views of the file system pretty easily.

Want to look at just the pictures with bob in them? If you've tagged your photos that will be easy.

If you're heading back to 2003 or XP, I'd recommend Cropper.NET for unobtrusive window clipping, and TaskSwitchXP Pro for the clickable task switcher (Alt-Tab replacement).