After reading about the numerous problems with Vista, I was quite hesitant to try it in the workplace.  I work off a laptop at a client site as a software engineer for a major consulting company.  My job demands that I have 100% uptime with all applications and software development tools.  I can not afford to have stability issues or any kind of OS incompatibilities.  To make matters worse, we use 2 VPN clients, 4 different large software development tools and a suite of other smaller applications.  After installing Vista Business 64 on a new Lenovo T61p laptop, I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

My first area of concern was, of course, software compatibility.  Will it work?  That was my question.  My biggest worry was that one of my two pieces of VPN software wouldn't work correctly under Vista 64.  I know that drivers are an issue for regular old 32 bit Vista, but initially it was an even bigger problem for the 64 bit version.  The VPN software I run is AT&T Global Network Connect and Cisco Anyconnect.  I have to be able to run both at once when I'm working remotely, as one gets me on my companies corporate network and the other gets me on the client's development network.  After retrieving the latest versions of both, I was happy to find out that not only did each one work, but they worked better together than their old XP counterparts had.

For development tools, I currently have to run Rational Software Architect, Rational Clearcase, Rational Clearquest, Aptana Studio, Websphere, MySQL, SQLLite 3, and a bunch of other small tools.  After disabling UAC and always using "Run as Administrator" to install, everything worked without a hitch, which I was amazed by.  Not only that, but RSA runs faster due to Vista's advanced caching.  I'm very happy with the performance I'm getting and would recommend this configuration to anyone.

As far as other apps go, I've had a few problems with outdated installers that have a 16-bit code module installed, as that's not compatible with Vista 64.  A quick update from the vendor has solved these problems for me.

Of course Microsoft's apps work smoothly and the backwards compatibility hasn't been an issue for me. 

I got very annoyed at my first few days when Vista was spending much of its time indexing and optimizing, but like everyone else, the problem just sort of went away and things always seem to execute quickly now.  I really like the new filesystem navigation features and folder view options.  The UI enhancements are fine but most of the benefits of running Vista come from the changes to file and folder navigation and the added configuration options found in the control panel.

As of Vista SP1, I have to give 2 thumbs up to running it full time for software development work.  It's been very good to me and if my environment and requirements can be tolerated, I have to imagine it'd work well for anyone.

PS:  While I now approve of Vista on the desktop, I still believe FreeBSD is the best Server OS.