ZDNet has posted their hands on impressions of Windows Vista Beta 2 after spending months with the new OS. Here's an excerpt:

Security
Security is one of the big selling points of Vista. One look at the new Security Center and you'll see why. Where XP has three entries in its Security Center, Vista has six, including the most controversial feature in the OS: User Account Control. (See my series on UAC - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, for more details.) There's no question that the new security features work as intended. The real test of Vista will be whether Windows users can be persuaded to keep UAC and other potentially disruptive features enabled.

Performance and reliability
Vista is packed with a bunch of features that have hardly received any publicity. You've probably seen the hokey Performance Rating dialog box, which measures your PC's resources and assigns a 1-5 rating. But I'll bet you haven't seen the Performance Diagnostic Console, which is like Task Manager's Performance tab on steroids, or the new Reliability Monitor, which sifts through event logs and helps you track down the cause of crashes and slowdowns.

Networking
And then there's networking. In Vista, Microsoft has basically replaced every bit of network plumbing and built a whole new set of interfaces. The new Network Center can be confusing, especially if you already know your way around XP's networking model.