Vista anyone?

[Firefox]

I'm talking about functionality for the average user, not delving into the depths of the system. DOS had a CLI and commands you had to type in. It had a rather crude windows sort of thing called DOSshell where you could group various items together - Still mainly using the keyboard. W95 had a desktop, icons thereon, a toolbar at the bottom with a start button, and ways to access your files using an explorer type system, mainly using the mouse. XP has pretty much the same interface. Yes there many are improvements from 95 to XP to Vista, but most of them are pretty obscure to the user. And, many of them, as you state, are to do with malware, firewalls, and internet security. Things born of necessity that the average user is not really interested in. The average user wants to click on things and open programs. Click on x to close, or _ to minimise. All that you can do quite well with W95. I'm still running W98 on one machine and it copes pretty adequately with most tasks including heavy internet usuage.

[geo_t]

Firefox: I guess we have different priorities when it comes to computers. For what it's worth, I'm the support guy for a moderately large organization, and believe me, having a system that actively prevents people doing dumb things is a good thing. By dumb, I mean accepting every "install this!!!!!" pop-up they encounter, or downloading junk spyware ridden apps from shady websites, or just simply messing with things they don't know about. XP in an active directory network is good (lots of things can be locked out) but there's always some wiseacre who thinks they know better and manages to really screw the pooch. But some things should be important for the guy (and gal) at home too... The randomized address space may not sound sexy, but by moving the program memory around from machine to machine (and from one session to another) Vista should prevent a lot of malware from running. Vista for 64-bit systems takes this a step further, where all system drivers must have a valid security certificate to be installed, hopefully stopping random bits of code from being installed. I say "should" and "hopefully" because at this time this is somewhat untried. While the OS had proved resistant so far, this doesn't mean that some basement hacker isn't going to figure out a way around this eventually. BitLocker, while being aimed at corporate customers, would be a very good thing for anyone who uses a laptop. For those that don't know, BitLocker encrypts the entire hard drive, so without a suitable security key the system is useless. Removing a drive from a system just leves you with a paper weight as the encryption would take many lifetimes for an individual to crack. [ Generally, if an XP system was lost and the drive put into another computer, it would be possible to take ownership of all the files and folders on the stolen disk then access them. BitLocker encrypts them making them unreadable without the original hardware and encryption key. ] So the big question a lot of people may be asking themselves... should I upgrade my computer to Vista. Well, if you've got a system that meets your needs and you aren't jonesing for the latest and greatest, I'd hold off until you're ready to replace the entire system. To buy the top version of Vista - Ultimate - would cost US$400, and some hardware more than two or three years old won't be up to running it. Having said that, one thing I did notice going from XP to Vista on my currrent system (for those who care, it's a two year old 2.2GHz AMD Opteron 148 with 1GB memory and a three year old ATI 9800XT graphics adaptor) didn't have the same performance hit that going from NT4.0 to XP did on the system I used on 2001. Then again, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation was just about the most efficient OS Microsoft sold up until now and would run really well on minimal hardware.