One very nice feature of Windows Vista which will ease my life considerably is the new Reliability Monitor, included in the newly revamped Performance and Reliability tools, formerly - informally - known as Perfmon. Reliability Monitor in effect keeps an eye on your machine and keeps track of its stability over time, as you can see from the graph here:
It's a relatively simple interface - there's no voodoo to understand here. The dotted line shows relative stability over time. Every time there's a filaure on the machine (say, an Outlook Crash, a System blue screen or a hardware problem, Reliability monitor takes note of it. Also, and most niftily, Reliability Monitor keeps an eye on your software installations. For instance, on the day shown in the screenshot just above, I'd installed the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK, a Defender definition update, a volume driver and mass storage device (my Camera's Compact Flash reader) and there was a config change made by Systems Management Server.
What this enables you to do is see at a glance what's causing stability issues on your machine. Notice your score plummet one day, accompanied by a bunch of failures? track back to software installs and easily see what the trouble is. I'll be keeping an eye on this over the coming weeks.
You may have noticed I've no longer got the nifty Windows Vista interface running. That's because this is my low-specced laptop, not my monster machine, and I've turned everything off to get a snappier UI.
Bonus snippet: Want to turn off window animations but can't find out where they are? the location has changed in Windows Vista. They're now here, in your accessibility options:
I've cranked my UI down to 'very, very basic' mode and I'm seeing some immediate easing of UI lag. You've just gotta love a snappy interface.