[dogscoff]

I will be avoiding Vista for as long as possible. I'll probably have to have it on a work machine, because sooner or later our customers who are using it will start phoning me up for tech support, but I'm going to press my boss to let me keep my old XP box alongside it, and I don't think I'll ever be using Vista at home.

From everything I've read, it doens't offer any worthwhile new features over XP. Basically there's no real reason to buy it excpet for (a) some stupid frosted glass eye candy or something and (b) Microsoft are going to try to bully software writers into making stuff incompatible with older version by refusing to make direct X 10 work on XP, thus forcing users to switch in order to run new games and apps. That's just extortion, in my view, and if that's the only way way can persuade people to upgrade then their operating must really suck, so will resist as long as possible. A new product should be a carrot, they shouldn't have to turn the old one into a stick.

Reasons for NOT getting Vista: you get (a) all this contraversial DRM stuff that everyone's going on about, which (if you believe the worst-case scenario ppl) cripples your media and sells your grandmother to a glue factory, or at best is just yet another layer of MS bloat to slow all your shiny new hardware back down to the performance of an arthritic Pentium II (b) an immature operating system riddled with brand new, as-yet undocumented security holes (it is MS after all) - at least XP has had a few years of updates to plug the worst of them.

So basically, I see no incentive whatsoever to 'up'grade to Vista. My next home PC will be Linux, or maybe a Mac (I think the wife might get on well with a Mac). SE will just have to work under emulation, or maybe I'll maintain an old XP box or dual boot to 98 or something- God knows there's enough install CDs and licence keys for that floating around.

Microsoft can kiss my hairy pink posterior.