I have a coffee slot. I press the button on my case and the cup holder comes out.

Sounds 'erotic'...

Anyway... So what other than security?

a brain

Oh yes...

1. Definitely interOS compatibility, time to give consumers a choice
2. An installer that allows you to select what you install, so you can get rid of all the bloat
3. No IE-integration, hell, no IE at all
4. Boot time under twenty seconds with flash boot screens, mmmmmmm
5. Windowshade built-in
6. Freeform skinnable ofcourse, death to rectangular windows
7. Modularity, so I can create my own programs out of the bits and pieces of others
8. Filesystem allowing multiple parents and aliases
9. As mentioned by others, full network windowing capabilities
10. Drive names instead of C:, D: etcetera, like on *nix

How about -->

1) a completely user-defined environment OS where you could shift your computer's resource management to and from certain tasks on the fly - say, donate the bulk of your CPU to rendering filters in PhotoShop? I don't like having to hit ctrl+alt+del, processes, set-priority to get 1 program to realize it is going to need a bunch more of the CPU than an "average" program. (Yes, I know you can set RAM in prefs in PS, but that's just not enough fine control dammit! - especially if its going to lead to a crash down the road.

2) I want to see an ability for desktop visualizations which are currently resource intensive (cursorxp, cleartype, streched 300+Kb wallpapers, resolutions above 1024x768, multiple desktops, etc) to have support on graphics cards - not constantly sapping the CPU. (Lots of people now have 16Mb+ graphics cards and most of the time the cards never get worked.)

IMHO Microsoft has PAWNED OFF ITS RESPONSIBILITY to make its own GUI 2D effects widely supportable by most graphics card manufacturers for far, far too long.

When you heap on top of this the fact that these companies must pay through the nose to get MS certified certs on updated gfx card drivers its a wonder that we have any drivers at all.

(pause rant)

(drinks a glass of water)

3) and oh yeah... open source code.

- ash

Well, craeonics is wrong. I run X~P now and if there was no IE, there would be no windows. Ahhhhh. I can't bear it.

But windows needs a dock!

proper periferals for use at work!

feline wants a great big panic button
say, about 8 inches across, a nice shade of read, so that i can hit it with which ever limb is most convinent, or in really bad cases, just head-but it. because of this it should be soft! my desk is hard, so it hurts when i head but it

when i hit this button, windows *must* imideatly save all open work into at least 3 recoverable backup's, even if blue screen of death is occuring (a common factor in leading to pressing the button to begin with)

I agree with u feline, if microsoft could make an anti-crash plugin for windows or even a version of windows withoyt the possibility of crashing.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Also what OS is most stable?

My answer is Win98 SE on my new PC only ever crashed ONCE
Second comes Red Hat Linux, only 4 crashed ( am good at breaking fings )

The most stable OS has got to be UNIX - pick a flavor, pick any flavor.

I've used Sun Solaris, HPUX, SPARC, IRIX, FreeBSD, and Linux and these are but a few among many flavors of UNIX.

BTW - for those who have not taken "the plunge" but want to get into UNIX, its totally worth it IMHO.

Linux (which has a few GUIs to choose from if you need one) and FreeBSD both work on most PC's and generally have the most programs ported/the most developers writing software for upcoming versions.

Additionally, for web artists/skinners, there is a program which is extremely similar to Adobe PhotoShop for Linux called GIMP which is 100% free and there are literally hundreds of freely downloadable filters, brush packs, etc for it.

Windowmanagers?

XP is good. Doesn't need a panic button.