Seriously.
Consider this. The Vista visual effects can be had for about $25.
Subtract the eye candy, and what's so grand about Vista?
Nothing. It's just a bloated XP with an NT 6.0 kernel and lots of tasty DRM to foul up anyone's computer at MS's whim.
Those three things are major items that would have set Vista apart and for many people would have made it more reasonable to upgrade. If Vista had those features (and I had the power to run it), I'd probably have given Vista a second look, if not bought a copy.
Having said that then, why should I pay $260 when if I wanted the same effects, I could buy the visual themes for $25 and the pollutants for free?
That's the point. The only way Vista is going to enter the home is on new PCs--and evenso, assuming the owner hasn't decided to put their copy of Win2k or XP on it instead.
People just don't see any significant reason that easily convinces to upgrade.
I just told you, If they can finally lock out all the the hackers, there will be people lining up.
Guess you missed it. But that is the only real problem facing windows, and if they can lock that down, everything else is already in their favor.
I have downloaded, burned to DVD and installed the RC1 and RC2 Vista releases. It's slick and functional but I really don't need it. Not for $200 and not even for 50$. XP is good enough. I tested RC2 on a machine with 512mb and an ATI 9250 video card that has 256mb. I could not get the AeroGlass effect. There seems to be search indexing (resource eater!) going on because searches are much quicker than with XP. That is a plus
LOL With Vista I opted to the classic windows look and now it looks more familiar. Like Windows 98 plus much less resources are hogged up by visuals (eye candy). Oh well, back to the future!
From what I can gather the main motivator for Vista is 64 bit computing - ultimately I think that is the driver here.
From a review I read about a year ago, they managed to offload screen redraws to the graphics hardware which is a "good thing".
Beyond that, I don't know, but I think the big motivator is 64 bit support.