I hope I am not sounding too much of a corporate shill here, it's just that I am awaiting Vista with extreme curiosity.
Since Beta 2 of the upcoming incarnation of Windows will most likely be released sometime May 23th-25th, I decided to review what information is available so far about Windows Vista. As expected today, all the relevant information was found from Wikipedia, although there are several interesting beta-reviews around the net but which may be a bit outdated by now. I am eagerly awaiting reviews about soon to be released Beta 2.
Even though Vista's development has been one hell of a rocky road, the new OS is beginning to shape up nicely and should be a welcome successor to the aging Windows XP, which is soon 5 years old. 5 years is a long time and it is beginning to show as Windows has been steadily falling behind rapidly advancing Linux and OS X, but it looks like Vista is going to be a serious contender even if we overlook the fact that Windows is favored by OEM manufacturers and thus the most common desktop OS, but this time Windows will also be a serious contender when it comes to features of the OS itself.
Instead of listing and going through each new or improved feature, I'd like to point everyone to read following two Wikipedia articles;
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Windows Vista-
Features new to Windows VistaSome of the new features are very interesting, of course if you aren't interested in tech stuff like this, it can't be helped.
The less computer savvy people here might be wondering what's the fuss about. To put it into a nutshell, Windows Vista is much bigger upgrade from Windows XP than Windows XP was from Windows 2000. The difference is more comparable to upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 or from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. The next question you probably ask is if Windows Vista will even run on your computers, the minimum computer requirements have been set to 800MHz Pentium 3 or Athlon, 512MB RAM and DirectX9 driver-compatible video card, you won't be able to run the new interface with all the bells and whistles but you can use classic Windows 2000/XP style interface.
I don't know about the lot of you, but unless MS screws up really bad, Vista is going to end up replacing XP on all of my computers soon after it is released. Not all of my computers can run the new interface and have to use classic W2k/XP interface instead, but with rest of the features still usable, I don't really care.