Is anyone planning on buying it when it's out... early next year isn't it?

I'm still quite happy with XP, i'm not sure I actually need something new!

ive seen the beta versions of this

its a totally new windows, nuffing like xp at all

its is basically a lot like a macintosh, everythin is shiny and glossy, it looks very sweet,

a bloke i kno is testing it , lucky bugger, here are some screenshots , scorll down on the page to "zaphna"

http://www.mademotor.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=3170

Exactly. It looks sweet, but doesn't do anything new that I need.

I still don't use most of my features in XP - in fact i'm annoyed it doesn't run some of my newer games as well as it should.

DirectX 10 will be nice though.

Real nice.

I have my Beta copy somewhere, I tried it, it's a gorgeous OS, even in the testing stages!

Well, with every new windows version, you need to upgrade your hardware

I had an old laptop which runned really fast with Win95 (or a light Linux installation). Once you had Win98 on it,
it was just unbearably slow.

I guess it is the same with the new version....to make people buy some new hardware.

Another nasty thing is that windows itself gets slower and slower the more you install and the more
you use it (without fragmenting your harddisk) - Linux doesnt need that - it never slows down.

I have used Vista, In fact am using it now. Very Good OS will defiently be worth Upgrading when it come out at the end of the year\ beggining of next. Its the new features and the the new UI. Very Good.

Good news everyone

Today, Microsoft have released Vista previews, in both 32 and 64 bit to the general public for testing purposes. You can get your copy here!

Please follow all instructions prior to installing, and don't do this if you don't know what you're doing. Especially if you're using a hookie XP

ive been beta testing it for the last year, and to be honest, it looks by all means awesome, but im not finding any major improvements from xp sp2, so im not impressed at the moment, still prefer my macs. but lets wait for the first release!

I'm no Windows fan. However Vista is 100 times better than XP SP2.
New kernel architecture, programs are not run by the kernel any more (similar to how unix runs applications).

Your PC won't crash if an application looses the plot, new internet security ideas. IE7 looks ok.

I hate NTFS(the hard disk killer), so looking forward to WINFS.

Shell is back and more powerful.

On top of all this there has been great modularising of most system components to make them completely independant of each other. You can terminate your window interface and launch a shell. This modularisation means you get even better performance. Less resources spent.

Search features are an integral part of Vista so indexing is now built in (Winfs enchances this as well) making it so much easier to manage the TB of data you have lying around.

To Toby: Indeed NTFS is a killer. WINFS is awesome and from what i've read performs well. If anything Microsoft have thought long and hard and come up with something different.

In the end it will appeal to many people and i think alot of people will upgrade fast. About the cost i would say you're looking at between £40 - £300 for the various versions, they are releasing 7 different versions (saw it on digg).

However my Gentoo install is very safe for years to come :p