While I believe that much of that stuff has changed with the release, it still has the hd/blu-ray protection and does something called 'shadow copies' that are difficult for normal users to remove. I use Vista and Ubuntu at work, at home I recently installed Vista on a separate drive for games but use Ubuntu almost exclusively. The ONLY positive experience I've been having in Vista is gaming since it actually shuts crap down when you load a game up. My performance is so much better compared to XP. Since I'm not gaming all the time, dual-boot works fine.