I prefer Vista. I'm shallow when it comes to anything on computers, so the looks are pretty important to me. It also runs very smoothly for me. I see nothing wrong with it, and I've had it for about a year. It's not much of a memory hog with me either. I can run The Sims 2 in windowed mode, Photoshop, MSN and Firefox all at the same time with no lag. Mind you, I have about 4GB RAM, but I think I could do roughly the same on my 2GB.

XP is fine too and I wouldn't mind having it, but after Vista I don't think I could go back.

As long as it does it's job, I don't care. :P

As davious will attest, he and I disagree about a lot of things, but I have to say I think he hit the nail on the head with this.

I am by no means a tech-head--so I won't claim to be. But I have a memory longer than that of a Goldfish, so automatically, I remember that the current complaints about Windows Vista are very, very similar to complaints I remember hearing about Windows XP....wait for it...from people running machines that were best intended for Windows 98.

Now, here's the kicker...the most common solution at the time was, "turn off all of XP's graphical finishes". This is also an option in Vista (turning off Aero, I believe), and it does reduce some of the memory requirements. Of course, that leaves the compatibility issues (which was also an issue with Windows XP in 2002/2003, coincidentally).

Now, the case could be made that they're a lot worse now (or a lot better, I suppose it depends on the programs you're using). I'm not having compatibility issues, but I used a custom-ordered machine built around Vista 32-bit (I intend to eventually reformat with 64-bit), so I might just be lucky thusfar. I think the issues with compatibility will only get worse, and Windows 7 will only suffer from them as bad, if not worse, simply because the body of software over multiple generations of kernells and designs has increased exponentially.

Apple's figured it out--only allowing a fairly narrow profile of computer software to actually run on their machines. If you want your game to run on Mac OSX, that's your own problem, not Apple's.

Naturally, we have different expectations for Windows Vista. I guess it's a shame that XP has just reached a point that virtually every single program since Windows 3.11 can run on it now, even though the OS is 'officially' superseded by Vista. Then again, in the first few years of XP's life, I knew lots of people who intended to stay with 98...myself included. Has Vista's introduction gone as well as XP's, from a technical standpoint? I'd say no, but I wouldn't say it's a total disaster. I honestly believe that at least a bit of it is beyond Microsoft's control--there's just too much software out there, and everyone wants to be able to run everything on the same laptop.

In mid-September, my Inspiron laptop, my last XP machine, died (serious video connection problems). So, now, I own two Vista machines, one 32-bit and the other 64-bit. I can assume that at least a few things won't run on either of them (mostly old, old games), but maybe it's just time to move on. Then again, not everyone has that luxury.

As for the rumor that DirectX 11 is supposed to come out in 2009, I'd like to remind everyone that DirectX 9.0 came out back in December of 2002, and 9.0a came out March of the next year. 11 isn't coming around any time soon, I suspect (try 2014)...hell, DirectX 10 has barely been introduced.