[allan gould]

Good

Originally Posted by Omaroo

Allan - I run Windows only because I HAVE to.... and on as few machines as possible.

You make me sound like an MS evangelist - but that's so far from the truth as I avoid MS product wherever I can. I run Macs in the office for our artists, Linux on some desktops, Linux/Unix on all my servers and only run Vista on a couple of machines because I'm a software development manager and need to know that our products will run on the platforms that our customers buy.

New laptops will be manufactured with BIOS/firmware which depends on Vista to run. There are functions and features in the new OS that old hardware won't support any more. Given that, it doesn't mean that you can't still blow it away and run Linux if you prefer - or Solaris... or BSD... or whatever. It just means that the hardware won't still support XP natively, which is a dead system. Sad (to some) but true. It's gone. XP's SP3 is what killed much of the time MS engineers had to work on getting Vista ready because XP was so prone to hackers, virii and bugs that they were re-deployed to fix XP up - again - and quickly.