Nearly a week after installation, Vista finally prompts me to activate. Personally, I like the fact that the activation wizard does not begin nagging you immediately post-setup. This will probably help reduce the number of activations where the user decides to reinstall the system on another partition two days later and then has to call in the activation manually. Strangely though, the actual activation takes quite a few seconds longer than the near-instantaneous final step in Windows XP activation. I wonder how many local files get modified during the process?

Another nicety is that there's now only one step to the process, it asks for no user input, and product registration has been removed. Hopefully, this will keep people from ranting and raving about how annoying activation is and what a privacy risk it poses.