Well, the time came. I got too jealous of everyone with Windows Vista and decided to upgrade myself. Before I start complaining, the reason I installed Vista on my main dev box is because I like it. I like the fact I use the mouse less. I like the fact I get prompted when things want admin status. I like the fancy UI. I like the faster start-up times and the additional support for mobile users. I upgraded to Vista because I like it. It runs great on my Mac Mini so I decided to bite the bullet and see what it is like to run on day in day out.
However, an upgrade before the official consumer launch means that I knew it was going to be painful. So much so that I actually bought a new hard drive for my laptop and installed Vista on it. My dev machine is vitally important to me so I wanted to make sure I could roll back quickly at any point. I took the opportunity to upgrade from a 60Gb drive to a 100Gb drive at the same time as I'm guessing that I'm going to have to use a Win XP virtual PC image quite a lot for the forseeable future so that I can test / reproduce problems with software in XP.
I started the upgrade on Saturday so that I would be productive again by Monday morning. The actual install of the OS went very well, by far my easiest install of Vista to date. I have a Dell Precision M70 and my Windows Experience Index is 4.1 - constrained by the CPU which is a Pentium M 2.26Ghz. My new hard drive got a 5.0 and my Aero experience got a 5.9 from my NVidia Quadro FX Go1400. Eclipse and Teamprise all installed just fine and worked with no problems so I knew I was good to start work Monday morning. I've created a new category on my blog called "Vista" in which I'll post my trials and tribulations as I use the OS day in day out as a Team System developer.
I have the same laptop as you. Thanks for paving the road ahead of me. :-)