There was a great interview regarding this idea on PBS recently: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...

I was recently assigned a nice HP laptop with Vista. While there have been a great many issues mentioned, here are a few which are more obscure with regards to efficiency.

1) Icons: While extremely detailed icons are very pretty, it is a demonstrable fact that they decrease efficiency. Psychology research tells us that the increased visual processing required by a complex image guarantees that more time will be spent identifying that image. The older, visually uncluttered icons can be much more rapidly processed by the brain and thus make fast work easier. While this may seem insignificant, it is actually more mentally draining over the course of a day and when one adds up the losses for an 8 hour/day user per year, it becomes quite significant. I would observe that this same detail deleteriously affects the "graphically improved" card games.

2) Start Menu: The new system has some benefits and some detriments. In attempting to organize my start menu, I found that it was necessary to engage in a minimum of six key strokes in order to create a folder in the start menu and that does not actually include the strokes involved in actually typing the name. Further, while certain elements of the start menu seem to be nice initially, such as the explorer-esque way that folders are collapsed and expanded, in practice it actually requires more time to navigate when one has opened the wrong folder. A tree system like that on XP seems to be more efficient. I would note that the search feature which has been so praised is an efficiency nightmare unless one intends to memorize the start menu names applied to all of the programs they run.

3) My Experiences running vista: On a brand new laptop fresh from HP, I have now had it crash six times in 5 days. One of those crashes actually provided we with the blue screen of death, which screen I have not seen in the last three or four years of using XP. Further, upon "shutting down," my wireless capacity is lost. Upon resuming from sleep, not only does Vista fail to connect to networks, but it cannot even see those networks. The only solution that I have as of yet found is to reboot the computer.

Positives There are some features that I do like on Vista. I really appreciate the fact that services have been given a tab in the Task manager. I am quite happy that Microsoft changed the directory structure for user directories to include the desktop within the user's files. This makes backups which seek to avoid program state information easier. The search feature can in certain circumstances also be useful. While I have not used them excessively, the new navigation tools within folder windows may also turn out to be quite useful as well.