At MIX06 we were given a bootable DVD with the latest Vista bits. Since dual-boot is not an option right now, I thought I'd try it out in a VPC. I knew the performance would be poor as the VPC has no accelerated graphics, and does take a CPU hit. I also knew I'd lose the glass, shadows, and some of the other eye candy. However, I have a 3ghz laptop with 2 gig of RAM and a mobility radeon X600, so I figured it would still be usable if not pretty.

It sucks.

Vista on the VPC, with 512mb memory allocated to it, took hours to install, and once running was too slow to even be usable. Vista's performance rating tool couldn't even rate the performance (not sure if that is unique here, or true across the board for installs) Of course, the fact that it even boots and runs in this environment is impressive for a CTP with an entirely new UI stack.

So, if you're looking at evaluating Vista, you'll either need to dual boot or pave a decent DX9-capable machine to try it out.