I'm running vista too, although im not sure the timer stop crack is working since although its been stuck on 29 days remaining for about a week and a half, it keeps asking me to activate.
Anyway, it doesnt run as smoothly on my pc as XP did, even with it using my 1GB pendrive as extra memory. My setup is a 2.6ghz celeron, 1GB ddr2 ram, 128mb radeon 9550 running dual 17" crts and a 300Gb sata hard drive, and vista runs a bit sluggish even with some aero features disabled. I assume its because of my processor, the lowest rated component of my PC. I did notice a slight speed up when disabling my Avast! Anti virus (its a pity AVG doesnt work with vista yet)
I love the cool aero feature when you click a button in the quicklaunch bar and all the windows go sidways 3D and you can choose which one you want, and i love how you can stretch a video over two screens (in xp one screen remained black) so playing multiplayer xbox through my tv card is way cool since you can get a screen each.
Other than that, vista isnt much of an upgrade to XP really (unless you have an uber next generation graphics card that needs directX 10). Now, if only linux could play halo natively.... then we'd have an operating system worth using.