I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's very nice visually. I still get an occasional momentary freeze but for a beta it's been pretty solid. I do not like the speed as compared to XP. Everything is slower (even with eye candy turned off). I wish someone could explain to me why bandwidth tests are about half what XP shows. A few programs will not work (even in compatibility mode) but that will probably be straightened out eventually. I would say it's what Vista SP2 should be with bugs.