Actually could be mid next year with an RC1 possibly at end of this year, but thats talk of course, this reminds me of the ME release tbh, seems 7 is coming along a little to quickly to be honest, hope it does include new file system removed by MS, also the Ultimate Extras could be better or actually exist, lol.
Ref the upgrade, well should always do a disk image before upgrading with something like Acronis True Image so you can restore back with ease to working system within an hour easily, depending on how much disk space you've backed up of course, works very well used alot.
But there is a big misconception that issues with Vista are all due to vista, actually the truth of the matter is its mostly down to bad drivers by hardware manufacturers, badly written vista compat software & updates by these same companies that cause the BSOD, not saying Vista is 100% solid by no means but I know for sure alot is down to these issues, otherwise systems tend to be fairly stable in office enviroments with Vista, these software & manufacturer companies had plenty of warning & build kits for drivers for vista but still took way past release date to get upto scratch, eg. Nvidia was the biggest culprit & still isnt IMHO very good, ATI seem to be better at the moment even if AMD are now 2 parts & swimming in debt, so dont rush to blame vista cause most of the time its not at fault.
No I dont work for MS, but its always the same story for people to bash successful companies, at end of day if it wasnt for companies like MS this forum wouldnt exist, they as others push the boundaries of what we are able to do with computers, so I personally have hats of to them as no software is perfect & never will be, Apple have grown alot larger since the ipod release & they are getting bashed as much as MS now so goes to prove the theory, become successful & people wanna bring you down as easy target, even seen a few bashings of Ubuntu recently as its become quite popular.
Personally & honestly Vista isnt a major improvement on XP interms of functionality but if you like better asthetics then yes upgrade but overall you dont get to much more that I can see from day to day usage that should tell you to upgrade, but then I've been in tech for ages so maybe I look to closely, but as a new buyer for a pc I'd still go for vista anyway cause its a step forward & there is a clause to go backward to XP on some systems if you like, lol, so asse covered if you prefer xp over vista
Its funny cause I remember when XP was released, De Ja Vous, lol, bashed xp aswell, its unreal.