How did your upgrade process go? Was it seamless? Were there any learning curves? Do you have any pet peeves about Vista? Do you see any features lacking in Vista that were there in XP or previous versions of Windows?
Switching to mac helped my productivity. Going back to any windows machine would probably cut that in half.
In my experience, you'll problably not notice any productivity performance when working with vista instead of xp. For just working it is quite similar. Most of the programs are the same or very similar.
In usage you'll probably see some improvements. It has a better standby functionality and speed(for laptops) but a slower boot-up time.
I agree with James Belle: It is not necessary to upgrade to vista, unless you are buying new computers.
unless you buying a new PC, i wouldn't recommend upgrading just yet, there are very few benefits and still enough compatibility issues to overcome.
I've been using Vista for a few months now and am very pleased with it. There is a monumental amount of Vista hatred out there, but I've found very little in the way of objective and meaningful arguments against it. In my experience, it's a good all-around improvement over XP in terms of stability, performance and ease of use. It's different, yes, and that seems to be what most people complain about. That, or they're running it on old sub-standard hardware and find it slow. It runs very smoothly on my 1 year old Dell Inspiron E1405. My favorite improvements are the integrated search almost everywhere (which is very speedy) and the almost instant wake-from-sleep. My one complaint is the backup feature - it's so dumbed down that its useless. I've had good luck with Microsoft's free SyncToy application for backing up to an external USB drive.
We have only deployed a couple of PCs running Vista on our network. It is a steep learning curve to determine all of the proper security and desktop settings.
We have purposely stayed away.