To all you geeks out there... you know who you are What is the consensus opinion on this new upcoming Windows OS? Are the kernel, networking, and dx10 worth the upgrade? Just how bad is the Bill Gates spyware, and will it be possible to turn it off? Any additional commentary would not only be welcome but appreciated!

Thanks!

I've been on the beta versions since they first started offering them (with one of my work machines). At first there were a great many programs that just didn't mesh well with it (symantec, norton to name but two). But with each update, it's been getting better.. I suspect by the time it's released it will be a good product. fwiw, I like it better than XP.

G.

I'm not thrilled about it, but I'm sure we'll be pushing it. I hear it has some nice features, programming wise, but then we don't do a lot of windows programming. All in all, I don't really care one way or the other. I'm not a gamer, so the eye-candy is moot to me. I'm not a grandma, so I don't want it to be 'easier', because for me it probably won't be. But, I'm not their target audience, so you're probably a better judge than I.

The concensus is that corporate adoption will be slow. System requirements are higher than XP, but that's mostly related to the eye candy. Turn that off and it's not that much worse. Beta testers have reported performance problems, but I have to believe Microsoft will address those before releasing anything. The features I find most attractive:

1. Supposedly it looks alot better than XP. A well-done Linux desktop looks a hell of a lot better than XP; maybe this will narrow the gap.

2. Re-written TCP/IP stack. IF the new code isn't full of bugs, which I admit is a possibility, then it should offer better performance. The home user won't notice this much, but it will affect Windows server performance.

3. DirectX 10 is supposed to be cool. I'm not sure whether it's limited to Vista or not- they may also release it for XP.

4. Supposedly it's alot easier in Vista to operate as a non-Administrator. And afaik that's the default. So, theoretically, that limits Grandma's ability to hose up her system quite as badly.

5. From what I've read, they made it so graphics drivers (and possibly others) don't run in kernel land. That means your graphics driver could crash without taking down the OS. That's a good thing. Again, it's of limited use to home users, but it's attractive to people who run Windows servers in that it removes one possible reason for a system crash.

6. Re-written memory management. Same caveat as with the TCP/IP stack. IF it's not buggy, then it should offer increased performance and security. They do some new techniques with loading system files into different sections of memory in order to make it difficult for those seeking to exploit the system w/ buffer overruns.

7. If there's a 64-bit version of Vista, which I think there is, then hopefully it'll get more/better driver support than the 64-bit version of XP.

I won't buy vista or any other OS that integrates so-called trusted computing in any of the present forms.

I don't actually *use* Windows, but from everything I've read, the only features that people actually wanted were dropped. All that remains is annoyances and a heft price tag. UAC appears to be broke in a serious fashion and not being "fixed". The DRM will be terrible. The one care stuff will probably suck, and it's likely that it will incite all sorts of anti-trust stuff from anti-virus vendors. The networking (they rewrote their entire tcp/ip stack) has been said that it will somehow break the internet (I've got nothing of substance here). Basically they took BSD code that had been working fine for years and rewrote it windows style... so it will probably be buggy. WGA and that stuff will be a requirement, so bill gates spyware = bad, and no you can't turn it off.