Anandtech reviews the latest Windows Vista Update, the build 5472 version. There have been a few UI changes like a change in the colour scheme, some changes in flip3D and so on and so forth:

Last but not least, User Account Control notifications have been tamed a good deal, which is good news considering our concern over them as of Beta 2. It's still not perfect, but we've found that as of this build Vista didn't seem to be asking for quite so much confirmation of actions, and it seems the default behavior of these notifications have been changed so that they no longer take immediate control of the UI and require being resolved before the user can continue. Now they act more like a traditional program, where the notification goes in to the background and doesn't need to be addressed until the user decides to deal with them. We can see how this may end up confusing to some users, but a more technical crowd will find this a much more desirable behavior.

With that resolved, our biggest complaint at the moment is Vista's inability to comprehend that certain programs need to always be run in administrative mode, and as such UAC prompts each and every time the program is run is tiring. Vista offers some ability to configure this already via Vista's policy editor, but the default behavior for programs that will always be run with administrative powers should be that they shouldn't require approval after the first execution.

From a performance point of view though, it is not all rosy and Windows XP is still quicker and more mature than Vista:

The most immediate change is that the Aero GUI feels a lot snappier; while we didn't find Beta 2's Aero to be particularly slow, now that we've used 5472 there's an obvious difference between the two and only now do we realize just how slow Aero was in places. After running our composition engine test under 5472, the primary reason for this seems to be that CPU usage by the composition engine has dropped significantly between Beta 2 and 5472. While this isn't a perfectly repeatable test, and as a result there is a greater amount of uncertainty than with our usual benchmarks, the drop from 33% CPU usage to 15% clearly indicates there have been some improvements here.

Unfortunately, the rest of Vista doesn't show the same improvement. Looking at some of our gaming benchmarks, neither 3dMark 2006 or Half-Life 2 improved with 5472 and the newer Nvidia drivers under normal settings. However the catastrophic performance drop that previously resulted from using anti-aliasing with Half-Life 2 does not occur under 5472, which is great news that in spite of a general performance improvement progress is being made, one that particularly benefits the owners of high-end systems.