After some colleagues told me that they installed Windows Vista RC1 on their laptop without any real issues, I installed it as well on my laptop. My laptop (from work) is an HP nw8000 mobile workstation. I did not have a good experience with Windows Vista in the beta stages so I was curious about the result.

I did a completely fresh install and did not have any issues. Almost all hardware was recognized except the wireless LAN. The nw8000 has an Atheros chipset which Vista does not recognize (yet). I downloaded some drivers from HP (for XP) and installed them. I did not install them with the setup.exe but used device manager. They work but I guess I will have some standby/hibernate issues.

The Bluetooth hardware was also recognized so I could connect Bluetooth hardware such as a Bluetooth mouse, my phone, etc...

Something that did not work was the integrated memory card reader. Because I am not really using that, I did not bother to try to get it to work.

With 1GB of memory in the laptop, Vista runs quite well although it is not terribly fast. All things considered, I am pleased with the results and will keep it on my laptop for now.