Normally I'd avoid a new version of Windows like the bubonic plague (I think it took at least until the end of 2002 for me to move over to XP), however in light of the fact that my desktop PC melted down and was for all intents & purposes unrecoverable without a reinstall, and also given that I can't find my bloody XP disc ANYWHERE, it seemed then appropriate to install Vista Ultimate.
The 64 bit version went on pretty cleanly – the longest time taken in transferring all my data from one drive to another before the reformat – however it became painfully obvious that nearly none of my peripherals had 64-bit drivers, so a 32-bit reinstall was the next step.
After the install finished it seemed that Vista wasn't going to instantly recognise my LinkSys USB WiFi antenna, so without internettage, I thought (at 2 o'clock this morning) “I'll just have a quick game of Elastomania then go to bed”. I know it's an old DOS mode game, but it used to work fine on XP. It was OK under Vista – graphics chunked a little, but nothing unbearable… although I think it'll be a problem when I go to play DX Ball.
Anyway, I quit Elastomania, and rather than nicely returning to the slick Aero windows I was expecting, the UI had pretty well locked up. No amount of CTRL-Alt-Del'ing would yield results, so with the sort of impatience that that time of morning confers, I hit the reset button. Bad move.
The best I could manage was a “Windows Did Not Shut Down Cleanly” screen, followed by booting into a black screen. Yee haa. Good job I didn't get carried away installing software on it beforehand.
I've got to say, I'm a bit unimpressed – that's hardly robust behaviour.
This morning I optimistically tried to boot up, and somehow (without doing anything different from 7 hours beforehand) it booted fine. Getting WiFi to work was another challenge, but hopefully now I've got some patches & drivers on board things should get more stable. Hopefully.