Why in gods name would we move to >64-bit any time soon? Theres no need 64-bit can handle up to 16 Exbibytes thats 16 Million Terabytes of Ram IIRC. Which is the main reason people are going 64-bit the 3 Gig limit in XP is not enough.

Even if the average computer would have 4 Gigabytes of Ram today it would take 22 Doubling's to need to move on or about 33 Years according to moors law, so theres no hurry.

And yes I know Moor's Law has to do with Transistor count and not Ram Storage but its the best approximation I have.

Also 128-bit CPU is not not 256-bit or at least there only working on 128-bit CPU at the moment.

Also in regards to the OP I agree its a shame 64-bit is not the Standard for OS yet. I also agree with you that Windows 7 does seem promising however I'm not going to beleive anything Microbucks says untill I have reviews proving there statments.

I've been tempted to audit a course at the local university just for the software discount. Not so much a factor now that I'm on Ubuntu which does everything I need save gaming, but it was nice when I was a student picking up software for $5.00 a disk - {G}.

Jonnan

I was one of the people clamouring for UAC.  What can I say?  It works so well on Linux, and I maintain that it's a good design decision.  Another thing that breaks multi-tasking.  Why does it need to steal focus?  Why must it pause everything?  Why does it happen two or three times for one task?

It's interesting how many annoying things about Vista this thread has dragged up.  I still prefer it to XP, but the niggles certainly are piled high.  And so many of them are to do with stealing control from the user.

Faculty are generally eligible for MSDNAA access as well, if the school has it. Might want to ask your IT guy or whoever is in charge of it if he can set you up.

I think it is not important, whether the system is 32-bit or 64-bit. For most users is important the question: will the program XYZ work on that system or not? And the second most important question is: will I have to learn a lot, if I want to do the same things I did last several last years?

Because the second question is yes (I used tu use menus and I like them. It is simpler to search keywords than "keypictures") I don't want Windows 7 at all. It may not be the bad OS, but I don't want it, unless it gives me something really usefull. As a programmer I have enough problems with the compatibility of old operation systems.

After losing their legal case with Sun Microsystems, it's highly doubtful they will ever do that. Microsoft is moving towards C# and Silverlight as a replacement of Java.

Despite my love for the Java language and the excellent Javadoc documentation system (beats MSDN, no doubt about it), it's all too obvious that Microsoft never wants to get involved with Java again . Sorry.

Agreed. New windows should not be able to steal focus.

I'd rather they don't. I'm sure the command line and *nix people love it, but that's not really their core audience.

How is it confusing?

An update on the topic at hand...

ARS just published a hands-on review of the new GUI. You read more about it here.

No doubt. I'll likely hang with Vista64 if they dont remove the DRM crap to be honest.

Vista has that same DRM so does it really matter?

Unlimited on the same hardware, as far as I know you can change the processor/memory/videocard and harddrives without wasting another reactivation, and yes I am speaking from first hand experience when saying this. The only thing that counts is the motherboard. As long as you don't change your motherboard you can reformat as many times as you want, however if you do change your motherboard you WILL need to contact Microsoft and go through them to reactivate Windows. You can do this 10 times, but once your motherboard is changed and you've successfully reactivated Windows you may format as many times as you want with your new hardware without being worried about activation.

I have heard that people have gotten past that limit of 10 reactivations with a new motherboard, so it really depends on the person you are talking to on the other end of the phone. All in all 10 different motherboards for a single PC is quite a feat, the likelyhood that 95% of people will go past 10 is highly unlikely. And if they do then they probably aren't using Home Premium/Ultimate but Business/Enterprise due to the differences in licensing.

In Vista it does not, I wasn't talking about XP.

I remember the good old days, when an OS was just an OS... I don't want a "complete" system, I want a platform to run my own choice of software. Windows 7 seem to be going in the right direction.

As for Ubuntu to be better... Well... Sure... It has its good bits, but to run the software I like I need to install literally hundreds of different librarypackages, some of the HUGE, which includes 2 complete desktop systems (gnome and KDE). I need perl, tex, python and whatever... It's not a home desktop system, because even the smallest apps have a huge lot of dependencies that potentially cause a conflict because it upgrades a librarypackage, or some other component that program X uses. It works for business use though, since they rarely change alot when it comes to what software is installed.

If it is an Combisystem which is using 32 Bit Games, Programms etc. and 64 Bit Games without Problems, I will buy it. I mean the same like Windows XP (that is a Combi from Win NT [Industrie] and Win ME [Gamers]) where many older Games Work (which were produced for Win 95/98/Me).

Vista have to many Problems, so the most People must use WinXP and Vista on one Computer. I know some of this Peoples. And I remember a time where I must use Win 98 and Win 2k on one Computer, because 4 Games did´t start on Win 98 but running on Win 2k without Probs.