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.

After having run Windows Vista (Business 64) for over a month now, I can say that with a few tweaks, I believe it is ready for full-time use.  I'm a full time consultant so I work off of a laptop in the field running a full suite of software about 10 hours per day.  This means that if my OS is misbehaving, I'm in big trouble because if I can't work, I can't bill my hours and if I can't bill my hours, I'm getting a serious call from the guys above. 

Despite all of the dogging of Vista from XP and 2000 users, I've found that I'm faster in my day-to-day activities than I was in Windows XP.  Here's my list of Vista must-knows: