Dell XPS m1710 with Windows Vista Ultimate part II
I've had the XPS m1710 for a month now and I'm very satisfied with my decision. Some of the initial glitches have corrected themselves with time. For example, HP released a Vista driver for the Color LaserJet 3500 about a week after I got the laptop. The disk thrashing that occurred immediately after login doesn't occur anymore - it went away after the second or third day.
Performance wise the laptop is great. I've had absolutely no problems running images consisting of Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server 2005, Office 2007, Visual Studio 2005, and Office SharePoint Server in Virtual PC 2007. When you're ready to play, gaming performance is sweet too. I've been playing F.E.A.R. and loving every minute of it.
Disk space is definitely an issue thanks to some of the huge VPC images I've been using lately. I've already filled the hard-drive. I just bought a NexStar 3 hard drive enclosure with an eSATA interface, but haven't hooked it up yet. I've also had issues booting the laptop on battery power. Since I haven't relied on this mode of operation, I haven't been motivated enough to track this one down yet, but it is bugging me out of principle.
I'd say the most common question people ask me these days is what I think of Vista. After a month using it on a full-time basis, I feel the same as I did when I only used it as a secondary OS - it feels like a lot of incremental improvements that collectively offer a refreshing change versus XP.