So far I have done all of my Vista beta testing using the ultimate edition but I finally decided to install and work with the Home Premium Edition. I am assuming that this will be the version loaded on most machines sold after the general availablity on the 30th of this month so I wanted to see what it would look like. The big project I tried out was creating a movie and display it. My wife works with the children aged 18 months - 12 years old in our church. She had lots of pictures taken from various activities that they had throughout the year and wanted to put them together as a movie and show them on the 30th. Of course that meant that I was responsible for contacting all the people who had taken pictures, getting them together, organizing them, and then making the movie.

I started off by setting up the machine. I installed the OS and then set up another user who is not an administrator to do all the work. I wanted to see what the end user experience would be like. Just to make things more interesting I turned on the parental controls for that user as well. I set them kind of strict just to see if they would get in the way of my video editing. I knew I wouldn't get any bad pictures so what I was really interested to see was if I would be forced to rate the pictures I was looking at or if I would get a lot of prompts.
Overall I was very pleased with the experience. I was able to preview and work with all of the pictures. I only ran into the parental controls one time when I clicked on some music and was told that I would have to provide an adiminstrator password to play the song. What I really wanted to do was download the song so I cancelled out and used the context menu to download the song instead.
I was impressed with Movie Maker. I hadn't spent a lot of time making home movies before and I found it really easy to use. I especially liked the auto movie feature where I could select a bunch of pictures and then have it make them into a movie segment with a title, trailer, and random transitions between the pictures. I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't do it for clips that would end up being less than 30 seconds (10 pictures in my case) in length. I guess they figured I could do it myself but I could tell where I was choosing the transitions because mine all seemed to be the same and not as random as the ones they generated.

All in all I think that Vista Home Premium will be a good replacement for the XP Home Edition we are running now and I will probably end up buying a machine around the first of February with it installed. I will continue to play with it until then trying to find anything that will break in my home network. One thing that I am really liking is the User Account Control. It is annoying but less so than my current situation where I have to run a batch file (makemeadmin.bat) that I got from Aaron Margosis' blog to go and do administrative tasks since I am not an administrator. Now the OS just prompts me when I need to have elevated privileges and I don't have to worry about going and doing something first.