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Having used Vista Beta 5484 and RC1, I'll say this - if you have modern hardware, it's probably worth the money.

But Vista is a real bear.

The most interesting thing about Vista is that it demands:

1) I'd say over 1 Gig of Ram - 2 Gigs is probably ideal, for now.

2) A high-end video card. Well, not high end - but higher than any integrated graphics chipset, and many low-level stand alone cards.

The real bitch is going to be on Notebooks, most of which - even many "high-end" ones - have integrated graphics. A lot of people are going to be mighty pissed when the find out that their $1500 Lattitude or Thinkpad can't run full Vista with Aero Glass.

A lot of people are going to be mighty pissed when the find out that their $1500 Lattitude or Thinkpad can't run full Vista with Aero Glass.

Only stupid people. An operating system is only supposed to serve as an abstraction layer between apps and the hardware. If it weren't for Bill Gates, people wouldn't have this moronic idea that merely running an operation system is supposed to be an "experience" and an end in itself.

The real bitch is going to be on Notebooks, most of which - even many "high-end" ones - have integrated graphics. A lot of people are going to be mighty pissed when the find out that their $1500 Lattitude or Thinkpad can't run full Vista with Aero Glass.

I read somewhere a couple of months ago that the percentage of PCs currently in existence that will be able to run full-blown Vista with all the bells and whistles is embarrassingly low, something like 8% IIRC. If Microsoft is expecting Vista to hit the market like Win95 did, or even like WinXP did, they're going to be in big, big trouble.

But even scarier is this: What in God's name are they planning next? Some OS has to come after Vista, and if they're planning to produce it the same way they're producing this one - by just layering more and more junk on top of code that, at its core, is still 1981-era MS-DOS 1.0 - is there any machine on planet Earth that will be able to run it? Will you need 8GB of RAM (which, even today, could potentially add more than $1000 to the cost of your PC) just to boot up?

They need to take the Apple route: Throw out everything and start over from scratch. I can run OS X on a first-generation iMac that's almost ten years old and it looks and runs exactly the same as on a brand new 2006 24" Intel Core Duo 2 iMac (although much, much more slowly).

MicroSloth has always assumed that people would just buy whatever hardware their software needed to run.

The criteria for MS code seems to be that it works well enough to ship, irrespective of how much it sucks the CPU.

In large measure people buying new PCs have kept up with the demands of MS. But this has left an enormous number of PCs unusable because they were no longer sufficiently powerful. Consumers have come to accept that this is just the way the PC business is, even if it didn't have to be that way.

Windows has been written almost from scratch a number of times. Any freepers who can contribute to my memory of the timeline are welcomed to chime in.

- Windows 3.1 -> 3.11. (based on 16 bit DOS)

- Windows 95 -> 98 -> 98 SE/ME (based on 16 bit DOS)

- Windows NT was a 32 bit design written from scratch based on a blank-sheet architecture by David Cutler (architect of DEC VMS, which rocks).

- Windows 2000, written from a clean sheet but based on Windows NT.

- Windows XP, based on Win2000.

- Vista, clean sheet based on XP?

But consider when this week's security hole in Windows is announced. When the patch comes out, which systems are shown to be vulnerable? Almost all MS operating systems!

What kind of management culture nurtures a code base that has several versions, some of which are supposed to be clean-sheet designs, that all have the same bug? Not a very good one, IMO.

1) I'd say over 1 Gig of Ram - 2 Gigs is probably ideal, for now.
2) A high-end video card. Well, not high end - but higher than any integrated graphics chipset, and many low-level stand alone cards.

it works fine with 1GB of ram, yes 2GB's would be great if you can afford it but it NOT necessary, I have seen reports of people using 512MB(hardocp.com for one)
GeForce6100 and 6150 integrated chipset is fine for AeroGlass.

) A high-end video card. Well, not high end - but higher than any integrated graphics chipset ... The real bitch is going to be on Notebooks

That's pretty sick. The advanced bells and whistles on OS X work fine with the Intel 950 integrated graphics chipset in the Macbook and Mac mini. As usual, Microsoft tries to copy Apple, but blows it.